Speaker 1: There's a new remote control station controller from George at Pactena.
Speaker 1: You guys are going to know him from the Ham
Speaker 1: Radio workbench and or the pac Tena antennas that he makes.
Speaker 1: He came up with this complete almost plug and play
Speaker 1: run on a Raspberry Pie system to control your repeater remotely,
Speaker 1: but your HF radios and your HAM radios in your
Speaker 1: hamshack remotely. And it's brand agnostic. It's not tied to
Speaker 1: one brand like Icom, YESU, Kinwood Flex or anything like that.
Speaker 1: It'll work for just about anything. It adds a bunch
Speaker 1: of different stuff to it. It's all plug and play.
Speaker 1: It runs Node red for monitoring. We're going to talk
Speaker 1: about it today. This is a cool project and I
Speaker 1: hope you guys enjoy it. Tell us what the I mean,
Speaker 1: just start at the beginning, I guess, tell us what
Speaker 1: this is what we're looking at here, because when I
Speaker 1: got this, this is the box of stuff that I've
Speaker 1: got here, and and this this is this is I
Speaker 1: didn't do this on purpose. This is just how messy
Speaker 1: I always keep my bench. So you're a Ham Yeah exactly, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so yeah, tell us George, thank you for being here today. First,
Speaker 1: off and tell us what we're looking at here. This
Speaker 1: is I see you're operating under the name Sierra Radio Systems.
Speaker 1: And is that new or have I just not heard
Speaker 1: that before?
Speaker 2: No, nobody's ever heard of it before, because we've seen
Speaker 2: a Radio Systems. I started that twenty years ago, actually
Speaker 2: nineteen and a half years ago, and the purpose for
Speaker 2: that company is to make repeater control systems and accessories,
Speaker 2: and so we've been making repeater controllers ever since then,
Speaker 2: mostly used by very large multi site linked networks. So
Speaker 2: this is not like a little tiny controller. These these
Speaker 2: repeater controllers are three U ras with a bunch of boards.
Speaker 2: It's it's pretty fancy, and the market for that is
Speaker 2: very very specialized, so it's only people who are building
Speaker 2: big network linked repeater systems would buy such a thing.
Speaker 2: And so that's what that where that started.
Speaker 1: Okay, okay, good, okay, Well that's a little background of that,
Speaker 1: because I think most people would would know that you're
Speaker 1: either George from Pactenna or from ham Ray to a
Speaker 1: work bench. So that was just another name that I
Speaker 1: saw in Michael's video, but also on these labels here.
Speaker 1: So I'm like, okay, I just wanted to clarify that.
Speaker 1: All right, good, so tell us what we're looking at here.
Speaker 2: Okay, So in a way, if I go back to
Speaker 2: we just talked about repeater control systems. So I've been
Speaker 2: building control systems for over twenty years, and one of
Speaker 2: the other interests of mine, besides portable operating and building repeaters,
Speaker 2: is remote operating. And so I've thought for many years
Speaker 2: that I should build some kind of remote station control
Speaker 2: thing and leverage the experience I had with repeater controllers.
Speaker 2: So I started working on some projects a couple of
Speaker 2: years ago to build some remotely controlled co x switch
Speaker 2: is for my shack, just for my own personal use,
Speaker 2: and made a couple of early versions of that that
Speaker 2: we made available through the Hamradio Workbench podcast. We made
Speaker 2: a four port cox switch at the time. And so
Speaker 2: this last year I decided that I was thinking about
Speaker 2: this for long enough I should actually make something. So
Speaker 2: I started seriously working on what I'm calling the station
Speaker 2: chin controller. And so I think it would be useful
Speaker 2: to find, well, what is a station controller, Because if
Speaker 2: you walked up to any Ham and say, hey, you know,
Speaker 2: what's the station controller, they wouldn't know what you're talking about.
Speaker 1: It could realistically, it could mean several things, right exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean yeah, it's kind of a generic turn. But yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: good deal, all right, good go ahead.
Speaker 2: So so the way I think about it, station controller,
Speaker 2: Each of those two words really kind of mean something.
Speaker 2: So what's the station. So the first definition of station
Speaker 2: is my hamshack, So that's my station. But there's other
Speaker 2: kinds of stations too. If you have a repeater up
Speaker 2: on a mountaintop, that's a station as well. Or maybe
Speaker 2: you really think about remote operating where I'm you know,
Speaker 2: traveling and I'm going to use my laptop to connect
Speaker 2: back to my station at home, some remote controlling my station.
Speaker 2: So that's this could be anything that you want to
Speaker 2: remotely monitor or control. So the controller part of station
Speaker 2: controller really means monitoring key vital signs in the system
Speaker 2: and being able to control a lot of them. So
Speaker 2: if you think about, let's say you're doing a remote
Speaker 2: HF HAM station. You've got a flex radio or an
Speaker 2: Allcraft or an icom or whatever, and you want to
Speaker 2: remote that radio. There's several things you have to have
Speaker 2: in place to successfully remote a radio. So obviously you
Speaker 2: have to be able to control the radio and you
Speaker 2: have to be able to send audio back and forth
Speaker 2: from your client laptop, tablet, whatever to that station. Now,
Speaker 2: that part of the problem is being solved largely by
Speaker 2: the radio manufacturers. So if you look at radios, let's
Speaker 2: say ten years ago and before then, most radios have
Speaker 2: serial ports, so they're controllable through a serial port, but
Speaker 2: you have to have some third party piece of hardware
Speaker 2: software to deal with it. But the modern radios, at
Speaker 2: least the i'd say the mid to high end radios
Speaker 2: today are architected with remote control in mind. So Flux
Speaker 2: from the beginning was really a remotable radio, and they're
Speaker 2: probably the best example of that today. Allcraft K four
Speaker 2: series is also built in a way that makes it
Speaker 2: naturally remotable. The Icon ninety seven hundred and the seventy
Speaker 2: six to ten and other Icon radios make it easier
Speaker 2: to remote because they have network connections and they can
Speaker 2: pipe audio. So that part of the problem is kind
Speaker 2: of being solved, and I really didn't want to address that.
Speaker 2: So there's other people already doing it, so that's great,
Speaker 2: But when you think about building a remote station, that's
Speaker 2: not everything you need. In addition to the radio functionality.
Speaker 2: You also need to be able to control and monitor
Speaker 2: the environment around the radio itself. So what does that mean.
Speaker 2: You know, at a bare minimum, you need to be
Speaker 2: able to remotely turn the power on and off to
Speaker 2: the station. And by the way, it's a convenience, it's
Speaker 2: a safety issue, but it's also a legal requirement. So
Speaker 2: if you are operating a remotely a remote transmitter, you
Speaker 2: have to have some kind of control on the transmitter.
Speaker 2: And the best example goes back to you know, building
Speaker 2: a repeater. You know, part of the regulations are you
Speaker 2: have to have some way to control that repeater transmitter
Speaker 2: to be able to turn it off if something goes haywire.
Speaker 2: Same thing is true for your remote hamshack, So you
Speaker 2: need to remotely turn power on and off. But then
Speaker 2: there's a lot of other stuff you might want to do.
Speaker 2: You might want to, for example, switch between antenna's. Maybe
Speaker 2: you have a dipole and a vertical or a beam
Speaker 2: and a dummy load, and you want to switch your
Speaker 2: radio between different antennas. Perhaps you want to monitor some
Speaker 2: key measurements, like what's the battery voltage if I'm running
Speaker 2: out of battery system, what's the solar panel voltage. Do
Speaker 2: I have AC power in the shack or did I
Speaker 2: lose power? Which is not uncommon for a lot of
Speaker 2: remote stations. A very critical thing you want to monitor
Speaker 2: is the transit line. So what's the forward power from
Speaker 2: my transmitter to the antenna and what's the reflected power
Speaker 2: coming back from the antenna. So if you have a
Speaker 2: highest WR you want to know about that and take
Speaker 2: some appropriate action. So you might want to measure the
Speaker 2: temperature on your amplifier or inside the shack or outside
Speaker 2: the building, you know. So the list goes on and on,
Speaker 2: so it really boils down to you need to be
Speaker 2: able to monitor voltages and switch closures and flip relays,
Speaker 2: measure RF wattage, et cetera. So all of that kind
Speaker 2: of stuff is what the station controller addresses.
Speaker 1: Okay, good, Yeah, add an AMP into the mix and
Speaker 1: you've got even more stuff. You need to power off
Speaker 1: and on and adjust RF output on the radio perhaps,
Speaker 1: you know, depend on what the amp is and that
Speaker 1: kind of thing. So yeah, okay, that all makes sense.
Speaker 2: Good. So, by the way, just give you an example.
Speaker 2: I was talking to Mike VA three MW yesterday and
Speaker 2: Mike's been doing remote station operation for many years, and
Speaker 2: his remote station is like one hundred miles from homes,
Speaker 2: so it's not like you could just walk over there
Speaker 2: and flip a switch. And he's he has one of
Speaker 2: my station controllers, and he's planning to replace the stuff
Speaker 2: that he's been using for a while with the system permanently.
Speaker 2: And and he said, guess how many relays I need? That?
Speaker 2: No idea, man, how many do you need? He said,
Speaker 2: I need twenty four relays?
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh.
Speaker 2: So now that you know, Mike is kind of I
Speaker 2: would say, at one end of that you know, complexity spectrum,
Speaker 2: because he has lots of antennas and and a lot
Speaker 2: of stuff he wants to switch. So that's kind of
Speaker 2: at the high end of the of the range. But
Speaker 2: you know, things could get pretty sophisticated.
Speaker 1: Is it expandable to that many?
Speaker 2: Oh? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Okay, okay, Well that's good to know. Cool. Okay, So
Speaker 1: what so so we've got so let's I guess the
Speaker 1: next step is just let's talk about the the image
Speaker 1: that you have. So this all runs from a Raspberry
Speaker 1: Pie and you're currently the image you currently use, or
Speaker 1: maybe the software for the image is running on best
Speaker 1: run on Raspberry Pie three, and I know you said
Speaker 1: you were going to work on a Pie five later.
Speaker 1: I don't know what the status on that is, but.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the Pie five is running now. Actually there's a
Speaker 2: little bit more to it than that. So so if
Speaker 2: I take a step back before you top into the
Speaker 2: Raspberry pipe part, the architecture of the system is very modular,
Speaker 2: so you can think about that there's a control computer
Speaker 2: and then there are devices, and the control computer can
Speaker 2: be almost anything. And so when I'm making a package product,
Speaker 2: I need something that the customer can just take out
Speaker 2: of a box, literally plug it in and have it work.
Speaker 2: And I think the best recipe for that's a Raspberry
Speaker 2: Pie and I made a module that the pie sits on.
Speaker 2: We'll talk about what it does probably a little bit,
Speaker 2: but you could use the node red low that I
Speaker 2: wrote off the shelf to control everything. And to do that,
Speaker 2: the minimum thing is you just need a computer that
Speaker 2: can run node red. So you can take any old
Speaker 2: beater computer you have sitting in the shack, put noe
Speaker 2: red on it, plug in a ten dollars interface and
Speaker 2: you can control the modules from that. Or you can
Speaker 2: get my prepackaged purpose built board that has some advantages
Speaker 2: if you want to go with the turnkey solution. So
Speaker 2: so my recommendation off the shelf is to use the
Speaker 2: note this running node red on a Raspberry Pie three.
Speaker 2: I tested on a Raspberry Pie five. It runs fine.
Speaker 2: Of course I don't have a four. Somebody else ran
Speaker 2: it on a four and it's fine. But you can
Speaker 2: put node red on any Windows Mac PC, you know,
Speaker 2: Linux computer you want, and you could run this application.
Speaker 2: The other thing is being modular. That interface between the
Speaker 2: control computer and the modules is very easy to even
Speaker 2: write your own or create your own control surface. So
Speaker 2: let's there's kind of two in my mind, there's kind
Speaker 2: of two kinds of hams. There's hams that just like
Speaker 2: want to go buy a thing and use it, and
Speaker 2: there's hams that want to design and build something from scratch. Yes,
Speaker 2: and this is applicable to both. So my primary target market,
Speaker 2: if you will, for this is the first case where
Speaker 2: someone just wants something out of a box. But if
Speaker 2: you said, well, you know, I know how to program,
Speaker 2: I know how to write ithon, I want to write
Speaker 2: my own program on a Mac and control your hardware,
Speaker 2: then I provide all the specs to do that. And
Speaker 2: you could easily do that yourself. Okay, although that's not
Speaker 2: I think that's one out of one hundred.
Speaker 1: But yeah, yeah, yeah, it's like, yeah, every time I
Speaker 1: put up a video about out of the Box Antena,
Speaker 1: people are always commenting how you can build that yourself,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, yeah, you can. But some people just
Speaker 1: want to get on the air and have fun.
Speaker 2: So I tell you, Jason, I'd say ninety percent in
Speaker 2: my experience, like more than ninety percent of the people
Speaker 2: that buy something just want it to work, right, Yes, yeah,
Speaker 2: They're interested in how it works because hams are you know,
Speaker 2: technically inquisitive, right, so they want to know, like, how
Speaker 2: does it do that? But and they also want to
Speaker 2: know that if they ever want to extended themselves they can.
Speaker 2: But most people are like, yeah, that's fine, I'd brother
Speaker 2: and just work because I'm too busy with life to
Speaker 2: you know, write, reinvent that wheel.
Speaker 1: Yeah true, true? Okay, good, all right, Well we have
Speaker 1: this image here running on a PIE three and uh
Speaker 1: and I have that piped over here to my one
Speaker 1: of my HDMI capture ports. So that's what it looks
Speaker 1: like right there. And I've got this this mouse here
Speaker 1: wouldn't work in quite well. But I've got it. If
Speaker 1: I keep it on this this pad on my desk,
Speaker 1: it's fine. So but this is a stock like I
Speaker 1: just imaged this last night, and you kept every time
Speaker 1: you would announce a new revision, I'd be like, ah, okay,
Speaker 1: so I'd download a new vision new I had Revision
Speaker 1: five installed or flashed, I should say, And then you
Speaker 1: told me about eight last night. So that's what that's
Speaker 1: what this is right now, this should be Revision eight.
Speaker 1: And uh, and I guess we need to probably do
Speaker 1: we need to connect it to the internet.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: You just need to connect it to your land so
Speaker 2: it gets a land interress.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's even so so small, I can't even so we.
Speaker 2: Could even do it without looking at the Raspberry Pie.
Speaker 2: So when you can install it, the most the simplest
Speaker 2: way to do it, you don't even have to look
Speaker 2: at the Raspberry piek. We just plug all the hardware
Speaker 2: together because what will happen is when it boots up,
Speaker 2: the Raspberry Pie will send the IP address to the
Speaker 2: display on the controller and then so you don't even
Speaker 2: have to lug into the pie ever you don't want to.
Speaker 1: But you'll have to uh yeah, yeah, yeah, so I
Speaker 1: would have to have an Ethernet port for that. I
Speaker 1: was going to see.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so what you want to do is have a
Speaker 2: Ethernet from your land into the Raspberry Pie and then
Speaker 2: and then we'll hook up all the control hardware and
Speaker 2: when it all powers up, then the Pie will send
Speaker 2: the IP address to the display on the control module.
Speaker 1: I just got to find an Ethernet cable that's long
Speaker 1: enough to reach over here.
Speaker 3: That's the only thing.
Speaker 1: How close does the Pie need to be to the
Speaker 1: rest of these peripherals.
Speaker 2: You need to have a cable that goes from the Pie.
Speaker 2: The Raspberry Pie sits on a host adapter, a custom board,
Speaker 2: so the Ethernet goes into the Pie. And then you'll
Speaker 2: notice there's there's three other No, not that one. There's
Speaker 2: one one of the larger white modules.
Speaker 1: Oh, it says host adapter on it. There.
Speaker 2: I go that one, opening that up.
Speaker 1: Good, good, good, Okay, that's let me switch to the
Speaker 1: overhead here.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I got the box in the mail and I'm like,
Speaker 1: and I opened it up. I'm like, oh my gosh,
Speaker 1: how long is this going to take to put together?
Speaker 2: So? Yeah, yeah, the good news is is that the
Speaker 2: thing will take you the most time is is figuring
Speaker 2: out how to screw it to the wall or right something.
Speaker 2: The actual system of connection is really very straightforward.
Speaker 1: Okay, good, okay, So that's the host adapter.
Speaker 2: So let me explain a couple of things. So you'll
Speaker 2: take your Raspberry pipe. You want to power it down
Speaker 2: and plug it into this this board here right here. Yeah, right,
Speaker 2: So the Raspberry pie flips upside down in the gp
Speaker 2: I O hitter plugs right into there.
Speaker 1: All right, so let me let me do a graceful
Speaker 1: shutdown because I'm I'm always the guy that's just pulling
Speaker 1: the power out of a Raspberry Pie and people are like,
Speaker 1: I want to say something about that. So all right,
Speaker 1: that's fine. Let's see.
Speaker 2: So, by the way, we talked about the Pie three
Speaker 2: versus five, and so yes, just a couple thoughts there.
Speaker 2: I think the best platform to run this thing on
Speaker 2: is the Pie three. And the reason is PI three
Speaker 2: takes less energy than the five, puts out less heath
Speaker 2: than the five, and it's more than fast enough to
Speaker 2: run this application. And they're also very inexpensive. So you
Speaker 2: can buy a Raspberry Pie three for thirty five bucks. Yeah,
Speaker 2: from eight of fruits, so you know they're about as
Speaker 2: cheap as they come. Okay, you can unplug that USB thingy. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 2: and now flip it over and plug it in with
Speaker 2: the header. There you go. Now when you plug it in,
Speaker 2: you'll notice on this one this is the beta hardware
Speaker 2: and it plugs in fine, but the USB connector touches
Speaker 2: the base plate, the production ones that's cut out, so
Speaker 2: it doesn't hit the little base plate there right here. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: there's an old notch there. Okay, so let me explain
Speaker 2: what's on that board before we hook it up.
Speaker 3: Good.
Speaker 2: So on the lower left hand corner you'll see a
Speaker 2: very familiar powerful connector. So there's two power jacks there.
Speaker 2: There's a power pole and a two point one millimeter
Speaker 2: barrel jack. Those are just hooked in parallel. This is
Speaker 2: the power into the system. So one of the things
Speaker 2: running a Raspberry Pie is you know what are you
Speaker 2: going to power it with? And you know you rather
Speaker 2: than running off of the USB waalwart that plugs in here,
Speaker 2: I built a power supply onto the board. So right
Speaker 2: above the power pole that's the fible power supply. So
Speaker 2: it creates a nice, you know, bible rail to run
Speaker 2: the Raspberry Pie. Then up along the very top edge
Speaker 2: on the right hand side, you'll see three RJ forty
Speaker 2: five connectors. Those are not Ethernet, and I need to
Speaker 2: make a sticker to put on that says this is
Speaker 2: not an ethernet not ethernet. Okay, yeah, So I'm going
Speaker 2: to use a term here. I want to define this
Speaker 2: term because I'll be using this over and over again.
Speaker 2: So the method that I use to interconnect all of
Speaker 2: the modules is a network kind of connection network quotees
Speaker 2: that I call the device control network. The device control
Speaker 2: network can be either done wired or wirelessly. In this
Speaker 2: case it's the wired version. And so what I'm putting
Speaker 2: on those RGA forty five connectors is data and power.
Speaker 2: So if we were to power let's say just the
Speaker 2: Raspberry PIEH module and then what you have to the
Speaker 2: right of it, which is the four port HF coax relay,
Speaker 2: the only connection between the two is a little piece
Speaker 2: of Cat five cable or Cat six cable. So in
Speaker 2: the bags there somewhere there's a short piece of Cat
Speaker 2: five cable that we'll use to hook into that co
Speaker 2: ed switch. Also rotate the coax switch one hundred and
Speaker 2: eighty degrees. So the connectors are on the bottom this one, yeah,
Speaker 2: flip it around there you go. Okay, okay, So those
Speaker 2: four little black RG forty five's that's the hub for
Speaker 2: connecting to the modules. So you can plug a little
Speaker 2: piece of CAT five cable between any one of those
Speaker 2: three connectors and the one there you go, yeah, just
Speaker 2: between those two, and that will provide data and power
Speaker 2: to that Cox relay. So that's the only connection you
Speaker 2: need to make, so it's really easy.
Speaker 1: Oh, it's probably that I was looking for. That piece
Speaker 1: of Cat five is probably in there an installation kit, right, yeah, okay, good, okay.
Speaker 2: So so while you're doing that, so the other things
Speaker 2: that are on that Raspberry Pie post adapter, there's a
Speaker 2: green connector up at the top. That's an auxiliary connector
Speaker 2: that has power and data also on it in parallel
Speaker 2: with the RJ forty fives, and there's there's times when
Speaker 2: you might want to use twisted pair for data or
Speaker 2: have you know, twisted pair to power it instead of
Speaker 2: using a connector, so you have that option. Also, you'll
Speaker 2: notice that right below the green connector there's two headers
Speaker 2: that are unpopulated. Can you take a wild guess what
Speaker 2: that's for?
Speaker 1: No, I don't know.
Speaker 3: That's all right?
Speaker 1: An LCD screen or No? That is that a? Is
Speaker 1: that a pie Star?
Speaker 2: No, it's a it's a hell Tech B three meshtastic radio.
Speaker 1: It's meshtastic. Oh wow, okay, all right, yeah, okay.
Speaker 2: So so you can take a Healtech V three module
Speaker 2: and plug it into those headers and then you see
Speaker 2: the little SMA connector above it.
Speaker 3: Yes, right there, that's for the that's for.
Speaker 2: The meshtastic antenna. So let me take a little time
Speaker 2: out and explain this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's uh yeah, how is that gonna work? Okay?
Speaker 2: Yeah, now you know.
Speaker 1: Now I'm curious.
Speaker 2: Okay, you don't need mesh tastic at all for the
Speaker 2: system to work, okay, period. And that's and it's not
Speaker 2: shipped with it by default because you don't you don't
Speaker 2: need it.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: So, when the architecture of the system is such that
Speaker 2: you have the main controller, which is your Raspberry Pie,
Speaker 2: and then you have one or more modules which will
Speaker 2: measure a voltage, switch an antenna do whatever it does.
Speaker 2: And I mentioned there's two ways to connect between the
Speaker 2: Raspberry Pie and those modules. You could do it wired,
Speaker 2: and the wired method is using Cat five cable that
Speaker 2: brings over the data and the power. And normally, if
Speaker 2: you have a controller all together, you would just hook
Speaker 2: up Cat five cables between the different modules and it
Speaker 2: just works. Now, there's scenarios where you want this device
Speaker 2: to be farther away than is convenient, and like maybe
Speaker 2: you have a tower that's a couple hundred feet away
Speaker 2: from your station, and maybe you want to do your
Speaker 2: Cox switching or your WAP meter or something at the tower,
Speaker 2: not in the station. So how would you do that.
Speaker 2: So there's two ways to do it. You could run
Speaker 2: a very long piece of Cat five cable, which is
Speaker 2: fine because this you can run this data up to
Speaker 2: a couple thousand feet no problem. So you could just
Speaker 2: run a big, old long piece of Cat five cable
Speaker 2: to the other side and it would provide power end
Speaker 2: data to the other end. Or what you could do
Speaker 2: is replace that Cat five cable with a wireless radio
Speaker 2: a data link. And there's two kinds of radios that
Speaker 2: we support. One of them is is a nine hundred
Speaker 2: megahert data radio module that looks like this. You simply
Speaker 2: put in a pair of wires into the into the
Speaker 2: block there in power and this will transmit the data
Speaker 2: to another one just like this at the other end.
Speaker 2: So you now have a nine hundred megahert point to
Speaker 2: point link. Or you could plug in the Meshtastic radio
Speaker 2: and do the same thing over Meshtastic, so you can
Speaker 2: have at the other end. I didn't I didn't send
Speaker 2: you one of these. This this is a future thing.
Speaker 2: This is this is the mesh Tastic module all by itself.
Speaker 2: So so I could have this mestastic radio with Cat
Speaker 2: five connection to a control module, okay, and so I
Speaker 2: can send the command there. The system can send the
Speaker 2: commands back and forth over Mesastic. Now, having said that,
Speaker 2: let me let me make a couple important points. Point
Speaker 2: number one is I don't recommend to deploying this on
Speaker 2: long fast.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2: Because you're going to be like, hey, Bob, you want
Speaker 2: to have lunch and then here's you know, every thirty
Speaker 2: seconds is some data from some machines somewhere. So that
Speaker 2: would drive people crazy. So if you're going to use
Speaker 2: mesh Tastic, you need to create your own separate channel.
Speaker 2: And that also means you can turn an encryption if
Speaker 2: you want. The beauty of the meshtastic radio is that
Speaker 2: I can run the meshtastic app on my phone and
Speaker 2: I can actually watch the traffic, and I could even
Speaker 2: send commands, you know, if I know the command format
Speaker 2: from my phone. Now. So that's what the meshtastic thing
Speaker 2: could be used for, but it's not required. In fact,
Speaker 2: there's a downside to meshtastic. The downside to it is
Speaker 2: it is latency. So these nine hundred megahert data radios
Speaker 2: are much lower latency than meshtastic. So I only recommend
Speaker 2: using the meshtastic stuff in if it's really necessary. Like
Speaker 2: I have a site upon hill, I have no internet
Speaker 2: to the site. I can send a mesh tastic message
Speaker 2: to the repeater site and I only ever need to
Speaker 2: like turn off the power, so it's not like a
Speaker 2: lot of traffic. Then the meshtastic thing is fine. But
Speaker 2: for for normal like hi activity networks, I don't recommend it.
Speaker 2: I would use the regular data radios or the cable
Speaker 2: is much more reliable.
Speaker 1: Okay, anyway, so I.
Speaker 2: Just want to get that meshtastic thing in there.
Speaker 1: That's pretty cool. I mean, yeah, I wasn't expecting to
Speaker 1: see that at all, So okay, good, good.
Speaker 2: Okay, So that's it for the Raspberry Pie module. By
Speaker 2: the way, another maybe one last thing. Most of the
Speaker 2: people who are going to get this system, I think
Speaker 2: they're just gonna want to buy it, take it out
Speaker 2: of the box, plug it in, and use it. So
Speaker 2: I can supply the Raspberry Pie board. I mean that
Speaker 2: that post adapter and the Pie itself and the image
Speaker 2: desty card. So you literally just plug in power and
Speaker 2: and data and you're done. If you want to build
Speaker 2: your own, and of course it's cheaper this way. You
Speaker 2: can just get the boards, apply your own Raspberry Pie,
Speaker 2: create your own sd card image, and go from there.
Speaker 2: But it's you know, up to you, all right, whatever
Speaker 2: you do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, good to know. Okay, excellent.
Speaker 3: All right.
Speaker 1: So we're back over here, and these are those Ethernet cables.
Speaker 2: Okay, so take one of those cables and plug it
Speaker 2: into one of the three connectors on the Pie.
Speaker 3: Doesn't matter which one, doesn't matter.
Speaker 2: They're all bust together, okay, all right, and then plug
Speaker 2: the other one into the OAX really okay, Okay, Now
Speaker 2: we just need to apply power to the Raspberry Pie,
Speaker 2: and that's a powerpole or a barrel connector. So twelve
Speaker 2: volts into the Raspberry Pie connectors.
Speaker 1: So we want to power it from here, not from
Speaker 1: over here.
Speaker 2: Correct, you never you never touched the Raspberry Pie.
Speaker 1: You never have to touch it again, okay, all right, And.
Speaker 2: It'll run off of a you know, one or two
Speaker 2: am ballboard or your bay station power supply. So one
Speaker 2: of the reasons for putting the powersplan here is every
Speaker 2: hamshack has twelve bolts, and if you're going to use
Speaker 2: the like the Raspberry Pie, a walwort, you have to
Speaker 2: have separate power for the rest of the modules. It's
Speaker 2: like there's no point, so you might as well just
Speaker 2: have one bovolt power input. It's actually a wide range input.
Speaker 2: You can run it on anything from about ten or
Speaker 2: eleven volts up to about eighteen or twenty volts.
Speaker 1: So that's good, okay.
Speaker 2: You know. Like so actually, while you're doing that a
Speaker 2: little sidebar for a boat station, one of the things
Speaker 2: you want to do is be able to run this
Speaker 2: thing off the battery if available. So in my station,
Speaker 2: what I do is I take a bio no battery
Speaker 2: and I plug the bio eno charger into the wall,
Speaker 2: and I plug the two millimeter jack into the battery
Speaker 2: and then I have a little jumper that goes from
Speaker 2: the bio Eno batteries power pole to the power pole
Speaker 2: on the Raspberry Pie. So now the whole station controller
Speaker 2: is going to be running off of the battery and
Speaker 2: it's constantly being.
Speaker 1: Charged, constantly being charged.
Speaker 3: That's good.
Speaker 2: And if I lose if I lose power at the
Speaker 2: station and the station controller is still.
Speaker 1: Up, okay, let me run inside and get one of
Speaker 1: my bioinos because my overhead I've got it sitting over here.
Speaker 1: This is my overhead camera, and I've got another camera
Speaker 1: that looks at my power supply and my incoming and
Speaker 1: my twelve volt connection. But it's it's over here to
Speaker 1: the side, so I don't have a I don't have
Speaker 1: a power supply right here. Okay, so let me go
Speaker 1: grab that. So let's take like a five minute break
Speaker 1: and we'll we'll start again here in a second.
Speaker 2: Sounds good.
Speaker 1: So there's no lights or into anything else. There's no
Speaker 1: indicators on here to see that this is powered on yet.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, there is, but but it's it's not. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you don't have twelve volts on there?
Speaker 1: Not seeing that? Is that the same walwort?
Speaker 2: That's just twelve volt walwort. It's a two point one
Speaker 2: millimeter barrel.
Speaker 1: Is that the same barrel that's on a bioin O Yeah? Okay, okay,
Speaker 1: So are we plugging into the pie or we plug
Speaker 1: it in elsewhere.
Speaker 2: Into the pie?
Speaker 1: Into the pie? Okay, now there we go.
Speaker 2: So on the display on the co X switch, one
Speaker 2: minute after power is applied on the display, it's gonna
Speaker 2: give you an IP address, so watch for that. So
Speaker 2: ideally you'd have the network connection plugged and then power
Speaker 2: it up, but it'll probably be fine.
Speaker 1: So okay, okay.
Speaker 2: It takes a minute for everything to boot up, and
Speaker 2: at the very end of that boot process, it'll report
Speaker 2: what the IP address.
Speaker 1: Is, gotcha? Okay? Right now it says selected port one.
Speaker 1: That's all it says.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so by default co export one selected. So while
Speaker 2: that's booting, let me explain a few things on the
Speaker 2: co X switch there. So, first of all, this is
Speaker 2: an HF co X switch, meaning it's good from zero
Speaker 2: to sixty megahertz, so HF plus six meters. It turns out,
Speaker 2: actually it's not awful at two So if you really
Speaker 2: could use it on two meters, it's it's not ideal
Speaker 2: it was not designed for two meters, but it has
Speaker 2: maybe half a dB of insertion loss, which is nothing
Speaker 2: you had designed for. But it's not horrible, but it's
Speaker 2: really intended for where it's got like almost zero insertion
Speaker 2: point five dB insertion loss. Okay, the configuration on the
Speaker 2: B and C connectors there, it's from left to right.
Speaker 2: It's port one, port two, common port three, port four.
Speaker 2: So if you had one radio and four antennas, you'd
Speaker 2: plug your radio into the middle one and then and
Speaker 2: then the antenna's or dummy load would connect to the
Speaker 2: other ones. If you have four radios and one antenna,
Speaker 2: then the one antenna goes to the center port. All
Speaker 2: of the relays are latching, which means that whatever position
Speaker 2: you put it in, if you pulled power from that board,
Speaker 2: it would stay connected. And that's important if you're preparing for,
Speaker 2: you know, emergency situations where you're gonna lose power. The
Speaker 2: last thing you want is to turn on your radios
Speaker 2: in like the antenna's is connected, so so that stays connected.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: The display on the on the module will show you
Speaker 2: the current state of that board, so it'll tell you
Speaker 2: which inten is connected. There's a way that you can
Speaker 2: actually change the labels. So if let's say Port one
Speaker 2: is your vertical in Port two is your beam or whatever,
Speaker 2: there's a way you can put that specific text on
Speaker 2: the display.
Speaker 3: Gotcha, you don't need the display.
Speaker 2: I think nine times out of ten people are going
Speaker 2: to just put this in a closet and close the
Speaker 2: door and they don't even need the display. And this displays. Literally,
Speaker 2: the display just unplugs from the module. You don't even
Speaker 2: need to use the display, but for this purpose it's
Speaker 2: good to see it. So that's the basic connections. There's
Speaker 2: some auxiliary stuff up at the top. The green terminal
Speaker 2: block connectors provide additional The one on the right is
Speaker 2: additional network in power that parallels the RJ forty five.
Speaker 2: There's a two point one millimeter barrel connector next to
Speaker 2: the RJ forty five. Those are all hooked up in parallel,
Speaker 2: so we run the power over the Cat five cable.
Speaker 2: You could take twelve volts into the barrel connector on
Speaker 2: the coax relay and then I'll just feed power over
Speaker 2: to the Raspberry Pie. So any of those connectors are
Speaker 2: all busted together.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: The last thing is on the upper left green terminal block.
Speaker 2: There's four pins on there, and there's actually eight, but
Speaker 2: four of those pins, if you momentarily connect them to ground,
Speaker 2: like through a push button, it will actuate the relay.
Speaker 2: So in addition to controlling the relay over the network,
Speaker 2: you can also have a set of switches to manually
Speaker 2: control the relay if you like.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: Also, you'd notice there's a USBC connector on the upper
Speaker 2: left or yep, yeah, and so in normal operation you
Speaker 2: never touch it. But if you on all of the modules,
Speaker 2: they all have USBC connectors that are connected to the
Speaker 2: CPU on the board, and the purpose for that is
Speaker 2: mainly to configure that module if you need to do
Speaker 2: anything custom So the way the systems designed normally, you'd
Speaker 2: never ever need to configure anything, but there's some corner
Speaker 2: cases where you like, you might want to adjust something,
Speaker 2: and then that's the way you can go into it
Speaker 2: with a dumb terminal and just type in commands and
Speaker 2: configure it. Also, when the device boots up, if you
Speaker 2: plug in a dumb terminal, you'll see all the different
Speaker 2: steps the thing goes through when it's booting, so you
Speaker 2: can see what's going on. It's it's kind of interesting
Speaker 2: to see once. But yeah, but you don't have to
Speaker 2: do that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, okay, all right, Well it came up and
Speaker 1: it said IP addressed a minute ago, but it was blank.
Speaker 2: Okay. That means that it didn't that the thing didn't
Speaker 2: catch the uh ip address. So let's let's let's pretend
Speaker 2: we're doing it from scratch. Now, look over on the
Speaker 2: Raspberry Pie board. You'll see next to the barrel connector
Speaker 2: there's a tiny switch. It says shut down.
Speaker 3: Yes, right, there's that button.
Speaker 2: Just hold that button for a second. Just hold it
Speaker 2: for a second. Lego. Okay, So now you're your Pie
Speaker 2: is going to shut down. So this is this is
Speaker 2: a better than the yank and the power. So okay,
Speaker 2: if you yank the power on an SD card Raspberry Pie,
Speaker 2: theoretically you can corrupt the SD card. So whenever you
Speaker 2: shut it down, it's better if you actually do a
Speaker 2: proper shutdown. Okay, So by now it should be shutdown.
Speaker 2: So disconnect the twelve vaults and plug it back in.
Speaker 2: So a couple other things. We'll go through the other
Speaker 2: modules in a little bit here, but currently there's three
Speaker 2: different kinds of control modules. This is the four port
Speaker 2: coacs really obviously, there's a module that we call the
Speaker 2: General Purpose IO or GPAO module, and that's a pretty
Speaker 2: universal module. It gives eighteen different channels of monitoring your control.
Speaker 2: So it's got built into it for DC volt meters.
Speaker 2: They could measure zero to fifty volts. It's got four
Speaker 2: small signal SPST relays, so you can have dry contact
Speaker 2: closures built in. It's got four open collector outputs that
Speaker 2: could be used to control a large twelve relay or
Speaker 2: like on a flux radio for example. There's the soft
Speaker 2: power on off remote jack on the back. You can
Speaker 2: take one of those open collector outputs, hook it to
Speaker 2: the RCAA jack on the flex and remotely turn the
Speaker 2: flux on and off through that jack. There's four op
Speaker 2: to isolated digital inputs, so you can have a switch
Speaker 2: closure of some kind like a door alarm or any
Speaker 2: other you know, switch to ground kind of input. And
Speaker 2: then there's two temperature probes. In the temperature probes, they're
Speaker 2: included in the package. There there's like a three to
Speaker 2: six meter or three to six foot cable with little
Speaker 2: silver metal cylinder at the end. It's got a digital
Speaker 2: temperature probe and so you can put those in the room,
Speaker 2: tape it to the PA or whatever you want to
Speaker 2: measure the temperature and other Otherwise, everything else is is
Speaker 2: similar to the co X switch in in that there's
Speaker 2: the network connection, the power connection, the auxiliary connections. Uh,
Speaker 2: the same idea as the as the co X switch.
Speaker 2: So what would you use the gp A board for.
Speaker 2: You'd use that to let's say, turn your power supply
Speaker 2: on and off, to measure the battery voltage, et cetera.
Speaker 2: So it's general purpose kind of application. Okay, did you
Speaker 2: did you catch the IP address on the.
Speaker 1: Well, it was still blank, so I don't. I don't
Speaker 1: think it's uh, it's not gonna link. Well no, this
Speaker 1: I don't remember if the Raspberry Pie is supposed to
Speaker 1: have a link light or not.
Speaker 2: But I don't think so.
Speaker 1: I didn't think it did.
Speaker 2: Okay, Well, you know what we could do is is, uh,
Speaker 2: you could plug in your your monitoring keyboard and all
Speaker 2: that stuff. We just go right into the pie or
Speaker 2: we can sssh into it.
Speaker 1: Either way, well, you'd have to have an IP addressed
Speaker 1: a sensation to it. Right.
Speaker 2: No, you can use the name of the computer. So
Speaker 2: if you have putty or something handy on your I
Speaker 2: do we could do that?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Okay, let's give it a try.
Speaker 1: Okay. Uh, I could also open up my router. If
Speaker 1: it did pull an IP address from the router, it
Speaker 1: says host does not exist. I'm thinking that it's not
Speaker 1: I'm thinking it's not connect.
Speaker 2: I think it's not connected.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it's not connected. So, but it's plugged
Speaker 1: into the same switch that I have my both of
Speaker 1: my computers and my Flex Rado and everything else on.
Speaker 1: So I don't know if this piece of coax is
Speaker 1: bad or or what the deal is with that.
Speaker 2: Can you unplug your flex and or something else and
Speaker 2: plug it in?
Speaker 1: That's all behind the desk over there. That is a
Speaker 1: bad piece of coax. I have link lights on the
Speaker 1: Raspberry Pie now.
Speaker 2: Ah so so how about that?
Speaker 1: Does it does show up? Is linked links likes?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Oh it does?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Never knows that? Okay.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I can't say that I have either. So I've
Speaker 1: got a bad power pool and a bad coact and bad.
Speaker 2: Is there anything else I can help you with debugging
Speaker 2: your shout right exactly?
Speaker 1: Yeah? I can't remember the last time I use that
Speaker 1: Ethernet on anything. Okay, do we need to reboot for
Speaker 1: it to grab an IP or should it do it
Speaker 1: by itself.
Speaker 2: Well, let's do If you reboot, it will do that.
Speaker 2: But let's go in through SSH and I'll show you
Speaker 2: how to do that.
Speaker 1: Okay, all right, so let's pull that back up and just.
Speaker 2: Say awesome, okay, okay, perfect log in as Sierra s
Speaker 2: I E R R A.
Speaker 3: By the way, but I don't know what it is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're not You're not old enough.
Speaker 1: Oh okay.
Speaker 2: So if you go back to the to the seventies
Speaker 2: era of radios when they had solid state receivers and
Speaker 2: tube finals, A very popular final tube in it, like
Speaker 2: in the Kenwood radios, was a sixty one forty six.
Speaker 2: So there's a pair of sixty one forty six is there?
Speaker 2: That's your tricky for the day.
Speaker 3: All right.
Speaker 2: So now now we're logged into the PIE. So what
Speaker 2: you see there on the prompt since the name of
Speaker 2: the this is a little minute show. But since the
Speaker 2: name of the of the PIE is station controller, the
Speaker 2: prompt would be like half the screen, so it's abbreviated
Speaker 2: to just the dollar sign and the name of the
Speaker 2: directory that you're in, which is Tilda. Here that means
Speaker 2: you're logging directory. Now, to make things really easy, type
Speaker 2: the word menu, hit return. Okay, so there's your little
Speaker 2: utility screen. The very first thing says get RPI IP address,
Speaker 2: so type one and hit return.
Speaker 1: Oops.
Speaker 2: Okay, okay, there's your IP address.
Speaker 1: Yeah one, okay, good.
Speaker 2: That's all you need to know.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 2: At this point you never have to do this ever again.
Speaker 2: The other things on the little utility menu here are
Speaker 2: just housekeeping things. If you want to go hack around
Speaker 2: in your Raspberry Pie to customize it, then this. For
Speaker 2: people who are not very familiar with Linux, this menu
Speaker 2: helps you just find convenient configuration files and let's your
Speaker 2: recoot the machine and stuff like that. So so we're
Speaker 2: done with this. This is all you need to do.
Speaker 2: So we can just exit out of here and then
Speaker 2: pull up a browser, take.
Speaker 1: The take the automatically added s out of your HTTPS prompt.
Speaker 3: Okay, there we go.
Speaker 2: And by the way, if you want to run this
Speaker 2: with HTTPS, then that's that's the user's problem to sort
Speaker 2: out how you want to run us securely.
Speaker 1: But gotcha, okay, okay.
Speaker 2: Now what you're looking at here this is the dashboard
Speaker 2: as as supplied on the SD card image. That is
Speaker 2: shipped with the product, and this has the control panel
Speaker 2: for three modules, or the gp io module, for the
Speaker 2: co x switch module, and for the RF wat meter module,
Speaker 2: which the want meter module. You don't happen to have
Speaker 2: that board because when I shipped you your your kit,
Speaker 2: I didn't have those those modules yet there there I
Speaker 2: have them now, so we could do that another time. Now.
Speaker 2: The beauty of node read is is you could just
Speaker 2: take this as as I ship it and just use
Speaker 2: it and never customize it and it'll be fine. Or
Speaker 2: you can go in and customize it. So like if
Speaker 2: you said, well I want three coax relays, well you
Speaker 2: can go into the NOE red editor and you can
Speaker 2: just copy my coax relay code and change the address
Speaker 2: and it'll just work. So it's really easy to enhance
Speaker 2: and modify this to meet your own custom needs, or
Speaker 2: you can just use it out of the box the
Speaker 2: way I ship it. So what you see on the
Speaker 2: upper left hand corner, that stack of green and red boxes,
Speaker 2: those are the four or rather the eight relays on
Speaker 2: the gpio module. The big box in the lower left
Speaker 2: those are the four ports on the antenna switch. So
Speaker 2: you'll notice that the antenna switch. LEDs are lit up
Speaker 2: green red red red. That's because we're communicating with the
Speaker 2: co X switch. The GPIO modules not plugged in, so
Speaker 2: those LEDs are grayed out. So because there's no data,
Speaker 2: So I preloaded labels in those four COAX positions, vertical beam,
Speaker 2: something else and some dummy load or something. You can
Speaker 2: change those labels. That's really something to do. But let's
Speaker 2: go ahead and select a different port. So click your
Speaker 2: mouse on one of the one of those green bars
Speaker 2: here at clicking okay, here click and you'll notice also
Speaker 2: on the board the led changes. You can tell which
Speaker 2: which one is selected. So when you when you click
Speaker 2: the this is important to kind of know for the
Speaker 2: reliability of the system. When you click a button like
Speaker 2: that to select the antenna, the dashboard sends the command
Speaker 2: over the network, the wired network to the co X
Speaker 2: relay and says, I want antenna number two. What the
Speaker 2: board does is it first of all, it disconnects whatever
Speaker 2: it was cooked up to before. It waits a short
Speaker 2: period of time like three hundred milliseconds. Then it connects
Speaker 2: in whichever port you selected, So you're you're you're never
Speaker 2: gonna have the chance of shorting anything out, so there's
Speaker 2: a time gap between disconnect and connect. Yeah, and like
Speaker 2: I said, they're latching relays, so if you pulled all
Speaker 2: the power right now, that circuit will still be in place,
Speaker 2: so it'll still be operational. The other thing that happens
Speaker 2: is after the board makes that relay switch the board,
Speaker 2: then the control module sends a message back to the
Speaker 2: dashboard to say, here's my current state, and my current
Speaker 2: state is Port one, three and four are off and
Speaker 2: port two is on. So when you see the LEDs
Speaker 2: change color, that's not because you press the button, it's
Speaker 2: because the remote device sent a message back saying here's
Speaker 2: my current state. So that way you know something happened.
Speaker 2: So if you press let's say vertical antenna and it
Speaker 2: never changes to green, then something happened and the message
Speaker 2: never made it. Maybe there's a collision on the network,
Speaker 2: or something got unplugged, or who knows. So just because
Speaker 2: you press the button doesn't mean it happens it only
Speaker 2: you only know what happens when the indicator says it.
Speaker 2: So click vertical antenna. The top up one again. So
Speaker 2: it took about a second or two for the LED
Speaker 2: to update. The relay actually switched immediately.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you could hear the relay click immediately and then
Speaker 1: it clicked again, and then that's when the LED. Immediately
Speaker 1: after the second click is when the LED changed.
Speaker 2: Right. So again what happens is press the button, the
Speaker 2: module gets the message, disconnects the relay first click, very
Speaker 2: slight pause, connects the new relay, second click, sends the
Speaker 2: message back to the dashboard. Dashboard updates the LED. All
Speaker 2: that takes one second or so for that tap.
Speaker 3: Okay, cool, and and that's it.
Speaker 2: I mean that that's all it takes to you know.
Speaker 2: The the biggest pain is like buy network cables bad.
Speaker 2: So I mean yeah, if you have a good if
Speaker 2: you have a good network connection power supply, this whole
Speaker 2: thing will take five minutes, right, So that's that's that.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 1: So these so there's there's four options for voltmeter and
Speaker 1: four options for temperature sensor. Are those something I have
Speaker 1: here or is that something to be added later?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 2: No, you got there. Let's go ahead and hook that up.
Speaker 2: So let's let's go back to the bench and we'll
Speaker 2: look up the gpio module.
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, this is just one of these Ethernet cables.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'll plug it into one of the black connectors
Speaker 2: on the on the pie board and then plug it
Speaker 2: into the first bonding connector. Okay, and you don't have
Speaker 2: to reboot anything. It'll all self heal when it when
Speaker 2: it comes up. So the so the board's up and
Speaker 2: running now, okay, so if we if we go back
Speaker 2: to our dashboard.
Speaker 1: Yep, yeah, it's already lit up. They're all red but
Speaker 1: it's all lit up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so it's so it's already gone an update. So
Speaker 2: go ahead and click one of the green relay buttons
Speaker 2: on like one of the first four ones. You'll hear
Speaker 2: it click like really one.
Speaker 1: Yep, slight click.
Speaker 2: There you go. So, so what you see here is, uh,
Speaker 2: there's the really one, two, three, and four are the
Speaker 2: the little white Ellie or led the little white relays
Speaker 2: on the board. Those are a single pole, single throw,
Speaker 2: two amp maximum contacts and you can put whatever you
Speaker 2: want through there that's two amps or less. Then the
Speaker 2: next four relays are open collector outputs, and what that
Speaker 2: means is that when those are active, that output will
Speaker 2: be pulled to ground. So there's a five hundred milliamp
Speaker 2: capable transistor that's pulling that signal to ground. So it's
Speaker 2: a solid state kind of a switch. And what would
Speaker 2: you use that for if you if you said, well,
Speaker 2: I need to switch like a thirty amp power relay. Okay,
Speaker 2: you go get a power relay with a twelve volt
Speaker 2: coil and you would hook up twelve volts to one
Speaker 2: side which I supply out of the board, or and
Speaker 2: you hook up the open collector output to the other
Speaker 2: side of the relay and it'll just there you go.
Speaker 2: There's some little relays that are in your installation kit.
Speaker 2: There are little dinrail mountable, skinny little relays that I
Speaker 2: put in there that you could hook up to that
Speaker 2: as an example, okay, okay. Then to the right of
Speaker 2: that it says digital input. There's four opto isolated digital inputs.
Speaker 2: And what this means is if any of those four
Speaker 2: inputs are pulled to ground, then that LED will turn on.
Speaker 2: So what would you use that for, Well, like if
Speaker 2: you have a remote site, you might want to put
Speaker 2: a door alarm on the building. You're on the cabinet
Speaker 2: or you know. I mean, it's a universal thing. It's
Speaker 2: a switch closure. Then to the right of that it
Speaker 2: says vaultmeter. And like you said, there's four voltmeters stacked
Speaker 2: up there. So the voltmeters on this system can read
Speaker 2: from zero to fifty volts DC and they're all system
Speaker 2: ground referenced, which means they all whatever you're measuring that
Speaker 2: twelve volts it has to be the same ground potential
Speaker 2: as the controller. Okay, so typically I mean and normally
Speaker 2: it would be. And what would you use the voltmeters for?
Speaker 2: Like in my station, I have it hooked up. The
Speaker 2: first thing I hook it up to is the output
Speaker 2: of my power supply because I want to know, you know,
Speaker 2: if the power supply is working or sagging or whatever,
Speaker 2: and if I'm on battery backup, I want to measure
Speaker 2: the battery voltage, which could be the same point in
Speaker 2: the system. So let's say, for example, if your station
Speaker 2: has a big hundred damp hower lithium iron phosphate battery,
Speaker 2: you want to hook up one of your vaultmeter inputs
Speaker 2: to that battery, and you might have a charger or
Speaker 2: power supply keeping that battery topped off, and when you
Speaker 2: lose AC power, the battery is still running, but you
Speaker 2: want to see what the battery voltage is to make
Speaker 2: sure it's still looking healthy. Then to the right of
Speaker 2: that are temperature probes. There are three on the dashboard.
Speaker 2: There's two jacks for temperature probes, and the software supports
Speaker 2: a third one that's not on the board, so there's
Speaker 2: really two temperature probes. And again those are little. There's
Speaker 2: like a three to six foot cable with a little
Speaker 2: capsule at the end, a little metal capsule. Yeah, you
Speaker 2: plug in the wire through a terminal block and then
Speaker 2: it'll tell you what the temperature is. No calibration required.
Speaker 1: Now, these are all connected through these four here on
Speaker 1: the bottom of the gpio board.
Speaker 2: Yeah. It so hold up the gpio board so you'll see. Yeah,
Speaker 2: there's a row of connectors at the bottom. So and
Speaker 2: if you look at the there's a little plugs that
Speaker 2: plug in there. So the actual place where you put
Speaker 2: the wire is a pluggable connector. So there's a little
Speaker 2: block and you it's a rising clamp thing, so you
Speaker 2: unscrew it. You stick in the wire and screw it down,
Speaker 2: and then you plug that thing into one of those.
Speaker 3: Connectors into here.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 2: The nice thing about that is, let's say for some
Speaker 2: reason you want to remove the controller. You don't want
Speaker 2: to unscrew eighteen wires or more right, you know, So
Speaker 2: you just unplug the terminal blocks and swap out the
Speaker 2: board or whatever, and you'll see silkscreen on the top
Speaker 2: of the board. It'll tell you that. The left block
Speaker 2: is the analog voltmeter input. So each pair of pins
Speaker 2: is like voltmeter one in ground voltmeter two ground voltmeter,
Speaker 2: three ground voltmeter four ground. That's the eight pens on
Speaker 2: that block. The next one over is the open collectors,
Speaker 2: so each pair of pins is like open collector output
Speaker 2: and in a twelve volt power out so you can
Speaker 2: you can power a relay. The next block over are
Speaker 2: the four little white internal SPST relays, so that's two
Speaker 2: pins per relay, okay. And then the fourth block to
Speaker 2: the right is the pulled the ground digital inputs.
Speaker 3: Through the offers right okay.
Speaker 2: And then along the upper top the two three pin
Speaker 2: connectors in the middle. Those are the two temperature probes.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, okay, so specific probes for temperature okay, good.
Speaker 2: Good, And again those are not thermal couples. They're not.
Speaker 2: They don't require calibration. It's a digital temperature probe. You
Speaker 2: just plug it in, it just.
Speaker 3: Works, okay.
Speaker 1: Nice.
Speaker 3: What's this one here, that's a system connector.
Speaker 2: All the boards have this and it's just extra connections
Speaker 2: for network and power. So if for some reason you
Speaker 2: didn't want to use the RJ forty five, you had
Speaker 2: a twisted pair you want to plug in, So let
Speaker 2: me give you kind of here's a here's a like
Speaker 2: an advanced tip. So one of the things you could do.
Speaker 2: If you're in the normal use you don't have to
Speaker 2: do this, but if you're curious and want to see
Speaker 2: what's going on in the network. Inside your installation kit,
Speaker 2: there's a little USB dongle, that little blue dongle, and
Speaker 2: on the on the back end of the dongle is
Speaker 2: a little two pin screw terminal and what that's for
Speaker 2: is it's a there you go. So so that's a
Speaker 2: USB comport ftd I chip in there, and it goes
Speaker 2: from the USB connection numerates a comport converts it to
Speaker 2: RS forty five, which is what my network connection is,
Speaker 2: and that's what those two pins are. So on that
Speaker 2: upper left hand corner terminal block, there's two pairs of
Speaker 2: what's called the AB signals for the RS forty five.
Speaker 2: So you can just take a piece of ZIP cord,
Speaker 2: you know, like you're you know one E gauge block
Speaker 2: and red zip coord and put it between the terminals
Speaker 2: on that little blue thing and then two pins on
Speaker 2: that extra system bus, and then you could pull up
Speaker 2: putty and you could watch the traffic on the network
Speaker 2: going back and forth between. Oh nice, the Raspberry Pie
Speaker 2: and the module. Now, for a normal you know, appliance
Speaker 2: plug and play black box kind of deployment, you'd never
Speaker 2: do that. There's no reason the world you'd ever want
Speaker 2: to do that. But it's it's if you're curious what's
Speaker 2: going on, you want to see what's actually happening under
Speaker 2: the hood. It's kind of fun to watch the traffic
Speaker 2: bouncing back and forth. So what you'll see is the
Speaker 2: Raspberry Pie will will pull each of the modules, so
Speaker 2: it'll say, hey, module number one, what's your status? Module
Speaker 2: one will measure all the inputs and send them all
Speaker 2: back to the dashboard. Then it'll go to Module two.
Speaker 2: Then I'll go to module three, and so it round
Speaker 2: robins through all the three modules if you have the
Speaker 2: third one there, and then updates the so the dashboard
Speaker 2: is updated about every thirty seconds automatically, or if you
Speaker 2: command anything on a board, it will automatically update that
Speaker 2: module when you do the command. Okay, so that's the
Speaker 2: that's the basics. You've basically done the setup now. Now
Speaker 2: the the only other work to do is to actually
Speaker 2: hook it up to something.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, So these are these are all B
Speaker 1: and C connectors here, so I would need like a well,
Speaker 1: currently I have the alpha delta four position switch on
Speaker 1: my for my HF radios because I have I'm trying
Speaker 1: to remember my lady's configuration. I think I have one
Speaker 1: antenna to the common and then I have my my
Speaker 1: flex and my Icy seventy seven hundred that go and
Speaker 1: and then oh and then I have an extra cable
Speaker 1: that comes up here on the work bench for doing
Speaker 1: video stuff whatnot, plugging in extra radios and whatnot, and
Speaker 1: they all go to the one antenna right now. So
Speaker 1: I would probably want to plug that antenna into this
Speaker 1: middle poord and but those are all PO twifty nine,
Speaker 1: so I have to get some adapters, which.
Speaker 2: Is so or look at you look at your bag.
Speaker 2: You might find some co X cables in there.
Speaker 1: Oh I did see those, yes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, break those out?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, okay, so yeah, so B and C on
Speaker 1: that end and PEL two fifty nine on that end.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, good, So those are going to be optional.
Speaker 2: They don't come with with the with the board, but
Speaker 2: h and the reason is that people may just be
Speaker 2: using B and c'st I mean most of us for
Speaker 2: our HF radios, we use PEL two fifty nine, two
Speaker 2: fifty nine, right, So they'll be available as options to
Speaker 2: go with the kit. Now you might say, well, why
Speaker 2: the world use B and C connectors? And and there's
Speaker 2: a good reason for that. If you're if you're building
Speaker 2: a device like this where it's on a printed circuit board,
Speaker 2: there is no such thing as a SO two thirty
Speaker 2: nine or end connector for a PC board. They don't exist.
Speaker 2: So the only connector that you can really use is
Speaker 2: a B and C or like an SMA. I don't
Speaker 2: want to do that. So so bn C is a
Speaker 2: perfectly fine connector and it keeps the it keeps it
Speaker 2: kind of compact to boot.
Speaker 1: So it's also a lot smaller. I thought that's what
Speaker 1: you're going to say, is they're just five in a row,
Speaker 1: So two thirty nine would take a whole lot more
Speaker 1: room than this.
Speaker 2: Exactly, So okay, exactly. Now I'm thinking I may build
Speaker 2: a bigger switch box in the future with more connections
Speaker 2: with it's a box that has can you know, so
Speaker 2: two thirty nines But that's like someday maybe.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, all right, good local IP address to connect
Speaker 1: to this system station controller from within the land.
Speaker 2: So that's a good question. So so right now that
Speaker 2: that problem is up to the user to figure out.
Speaker 2: So the simple answer I'm not wild about. The simple
Speaker 2: answer is you open a port on your router and
Speaker 2: when you're and you know the wane address of your router,
Speaker 2: so when you're out and about, you point to the
Speaker 2: wine address and the port and then you'll see the
Speaker 2: web page. Now the problem with that, of course is
Speaker 2: now that's a vulnerability, right, you know idea but like
Speaker 2: when you run your flex, you have to open up
Speaker 2: you know, ports to talk to your flex, correct, although
Speaker 2: smart link does kind of help you with that. So
Speaker 2: one of the things that that we're working on is
Speaker 2: is looking at doing a something similar to smart link
Speaker 2: where you would have a a server you would log
Speaker 2: into which would then essentially proxy to your your device
Speaker 2: at home, which would give you a layer of security.
Speaker 2: So that's probably a better approach. You know, a lot
Speaker 2: of people will do a VPN or they'll do some
Speaker 2: of you know people, there's a lot of hams who
Speaker 2: are really networking experts, and they'll just they have sixteen
Speaker 2: different ways they'll do it. But for the casual, non
Speaker 2: network expert, then besides opening up ports, we're looking at
Speaker 2: at having a proxy service to make that available. But
Speaker 2: that that's not going to be a free thing. That's
Speaker 2: like a subscription thing. But that's that's not our business
Speaker 2: model is not to have a subscription model where you
Speaker 2: have to use a service. This is all self hosted
Speaker 2: and self run and and that would just be like
Speaker 2: an option if you really want to do that. But
Speaker 2: and that's not available yet anyway, probably later this year.
Speaker 1: Right right, Yeah, okay, we can all always us like
Speaker 1: some sort of remote desktop or V and C for
Speaker 1: sure to get into your network, which is what I use.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Actually, remote desktop is a really good idea because
Speaker 2: that way you don't even have to yeah, you just
Speaker 2: point to that. And now, by the way, the other
Speaker 2: things you see in this dashboard here on the right
Speaker 2: hand side is the RF want meter. You don't have
Speaker 2: that module there, but but I did get those modules there.
Speaker 2: I've got them now they're up and running. They're they're
Speaker 2: working fine. The way the RF module works it looks
Speaker 2: very much like the coax really, except it's got two
Speaker 2: ports on it to talk to two RF directional couplers,
Speaker 2: so that means you can essentially have two want meters
Speaker 2: built into the system for one with each module you
Speaker 2: can have more modules, but it's two. So the way
Speaker 2: it works is is I didn't want to make the
Speaker 2: actual directional coupler itself, and there's a fella who I've
Speaker 2: worked with before that makes them that are they're very good.
Speaker 2: He has a company called wave Node, and wave Node
Speaker 2: makes want meters and they make their own directional couplers
Speaker 2: and it's very easy to integrate their directional coupler into
Speaker 2: my system, so I just built it around their couplers.
Speaker 2: So their directional couplers are a little box. There's two connectors,
Speaker 2: so two thirty nine or n and they make different
Speaker 2: wattage and frequency range models, so there's three of them
Speaker 2: that are supported in the system. Currently. There's a the
Speaker 2: HF one meter a coupler which is zero to two
Speaker 2: thousand watts HF and six. There's a low power HF
Speaker 2: one that's good for zero to sixty watts, and then
Speaker 2: there's a UHFVHF model that's good up to I think
Speaker 2: a couple one hundred watts up to three hundred or
Speaker 2: up to five hundred mega hertz or something. So for
Speaker 2: like two meters, you'd use the UHF one. You can
Speaker 2: plug any of those three directional couplers into either of
Speaker 2: the two ports, and then there's a way that you
Speaker 2: tell the wat meter what the personality is of that thing.
Speaker 2: So let's say I have an Let's say I have
Speaker 2: my Flex radio and my Icon ninety seven hundred. I
Speaker 2: would take the HF coupler, plug it into port one,
Speaker 2: take my VHF coupler, plug it into port two, and
Speaker 2: then I would go through the USB port on the
Speaker 2: module with putty and there's a couple of commands that
Speaker 2: tells it what kind of module I'm using, and then
Speaker 2: everything is pre calibrated and goes from there. So there's
Speaker 2: a couple of ways that the WALP meter thing works.
Speaker 2: One thing is is that you can you can probe
Speaker 2: the status of the module, and the dashboard every thirty
Speaker 2: seconds probes every control module. It says what's your status.
Speaker 2: So when you do that, if there's any power being
Speaker 2: measured from either of those ports, it will show up
Speaker 2: on these gauges. So you can see the upper right
Speaker 2: hand corner is port one, so that's the first coupler.
Speaker 2: One meter is forward power, the other meter is reflected power,
Speaker 2: and then below that is walt meter two. The second port,
Speaker 2: same thing, forward and reflected power. So this is kind
Speaker 2: of the passive way to do it, where it's just
Speaker 2: constantly measuring it and giving you an update about what's
Speaker 2: going on. The Other thing you can do is you
Speaker 2: can force a test. So the buttons below that says
Speaker 2: run are a want meter test on port one and
Speaker 2: on port two. Now what that does is it keys
Speaker 2: the transmitter, measures the power and returns the value. So
Speaker 2: this is really more useful for remote operating. So think
Speaker 2: about this way. When you're operating remote, You're not gonna
Speaker 2: want to watch the want meter constantly. What you want
Speaker 2: to do is maybe when you start, you know, I
Speaker 2: land in Hawaii, I pull out my tablet, I want
Speaker 2: to connect to my flex and I want to see,
Speaker 2: you know, how much power am I putting out? So
Speaker 2: you go to the dashboard, you hit run want meter test,
Speaker 2: and it'll tell you the ford and reflected power and
Speaker 2: then you'll say, okay, I'm good to go, and off
Speaker 2: I go. Now, the way that works is on the
Speaker 2: want meter board, there's a couple of extra optional pins,
Speaker 2: and one of the pins on each port is a
Speaker 2: push to talk line. So when you press that first
Speaker 2: big green button, it tells the want meter first of all,
Speaker 2: to key the radio. So it pulls the PTT line low,
Speaker 2: keys up the transmitter, then measures the wattage, and then
Speaker 2: unkeys the transmitter and returns that wattage back to the user. Now, currently,
Speaker 2: if you're if you're in, you have to put the
Speaker 2: radio it like into CW mode and then and then
Speaker 2: you have to do a key down with the PTT
Speaker 2: then and it'll work just fine. One of the things
Speaker 2: that I want to do with this is to add
Speaker 2: the the like, for example, the Flex Radio Control API,
Speaker 2: so that it'll it'll tell the Flex radio to do
Speaker 2: that automatically. I've had requests to add HAMLEB to the
Speaker 2: dashboard so you can hook up you know, your Icon
Speaker 2: seventy three hundred and do the same thing. So those
Speaker 2: are enhancements that I'm going to make to this over time.
Speaker 2: But right now that that's the way it works. The
Speaker 2: other thing that's that's useful is if let's say you're
Speaker 2: using this on a repeater system, there is also a
Speaker 2: an optional input pin that is a PTT input, and
Speaker 2: you might say, well, I want that. So so imagine this.
Speaker 2: You've got the want meter on your two meter repeater
Speaker 2: M and one day you go, you know what, the
Speaker 2: I don't repeaters off the air? What's going on? And
Speaker 2: you you know, you key up, You don't hear anything.
Speaker 2: You go to the dashboard, you hit run the run
Speaker 2: the power test, and it comes back with zero watts. Okay,
Speaker 2: I zero wats is a problem. But I want to
Speaker 2: know did the transmitter think it was being keyed up
Speaker 2: at the time, because if you measure zero watts, that's
Speaker 2: either really bad or irrelevant because the transmitter is not
Speaker 2: keyed up. So so you can both monitor the state
Speaker 2: of the of the PTT line to the transmitter and
Speaker 2: you can also force it to PTT through the through
Speaker 2: the want meter.
Speaker 1: Okay, nice, Okay, Okay? These what meters you're talking about
Speaker 1: from wave note? Are that is that a is it
Speaker 1: a hardware or is that software?
Speaker 3: What meter?
Speaker 2: Oh no, it's it's a piece of hardware. So when
Speaker 2: you buy a want meter from Wave, note they have
Speaker 2: a control head and they have a directional coupler. Okay,
Speaker 2: so to use with our system, you don't need the
Speaker 2: want meter control head at all. Right, all you need
Speaker 2: is the directional coupler. And and by the way, the
Speaker 2: HF directional coupler is like sixty five bucks. Oh, I
Speaker 2: mean it is really really reasonably priced. Yeah yeah, okay,
Speaker 2: that will force the MP address out into the module.
Speaker 1: That's what it did. Yep, that's exactly what it did. Okay, Yeah,
Speaker 1: this module right here.
Speaker 2: And then on the dashboard you'll notice that in the
Speaker 2: upper left hand corner of the dashboard there's the usual
Speaker 2: little hamburger.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 2: If you click on that, you'll see there's a second
Speaker 2: page that's Pie monitor. So this is a generic Pie
Speaker 2: computer status page.
Speaker 1: Okay. Every time I do a video about a Raspberry
Speaker 1: Pie something something, people are always commenting, Wow, that's see
Speaker 1: you tumberature is high. It's like, well, yeah, it's not.
Speaker 1: I've got the heater going because it's forty degrees outside
Speaker 1: right now, and there's no fan on this pie. Is
Speaker 1: there a there? I guess Since applies upside down, you
Speaker 1: can't really add a fan to the CPU.
Speaker 2: On this thing, not not to the not to the
Speaker 2: top side. So it's yes, it's not just air cooled.
Speaker 2: Usually they don't tend to rend quite this high. But
Speaker 2: it seems to be fine.
Speaker 1: Normal, it's a little high, but again it's it's warm
Speaker 1: in here right now, so I can adjust that accordingly.
Speaker 1: But yeah, good, But that's that's good that you could
Speaker 1: monitor the actual pie though you can see how much
Speaker 1: it's just disk space and whatnot.
Speaker 3: So so this is.
Speaker 2: The beauty of node red that I built this dashboard
Speaker 2: and you can just go use it and it does
Speaker 2: what it's supposed to do and you never have to
Speaker 2: touch it. Or I think, like a lot of us,
Speaker 2: the first time you use something, you don't want to.
Speaker 2: You don't want to start scratch, you want to just
Speaker 2: start working. But once you start to get the hang
Speaker 2: of whatever the thing is, then you start thinking, you know,
Speaker 2: I could do this if only I had a way
Speaker 2: to get to it. And so the nice thing about
Speaker 2: node red is you can extend it as much as
Speaker 2: you want and become as much of a node red guru.
Speaker 2: And there's literally thousands of people doing this because if
Speaker 2: you go to groups dot io and go to the
Speaker 2: node red hand Radio forum. There's like two thousand plus
Speaker 2: members of that forum alone. Wow, So there's a whole
Speaker 2: lot of people out there that are doing these things,
Speaker 2: you know, like Mike and like Kyle A. Zero Z
Speaker 2: and a lot of other people that are very knowledgeable.
Speaker 2: And to add functionality, it's really pretty easy. You just
Speaker 2: go to through the web browser, you point to a
Speaker 2: different IP address, you see all the flows and you
Speaker 2: can modify them or copy them or add in something
Speaker 2: else and it just works. And so what we're going
Speaker 2: to distribute is is this software in two forms. One
Speaker 2: is the SD card image, which has the operating system
Speaker 2: pre configured with all the things that you have to do,
Speaker 2: and there's like a dozen or two things that have
Speaker 2: to be done to configure it properly, but that'll all
Speaker 2: be pre configured on the STD card or on the
Speaker 2: image that you could download. And then there's the flow,
Speaker 2: which is the dashboard that's also pre installed, of course,
Speaker 2: but that will evolve over time as we add more
Speaker 2: things to the NOE re read environment. There may be
Speaker 2: new libraries to add or new flows with new features,
Speaker 2: and those will be separately downloadable, So you don't have
Speaker 2: to reimage the thing, although you could or just download
Speaker 2: the new flow and run that.
Speaker 1: What kind of time frame you looking at before this
Speaker 1: is available to the public.
Speaker 2: So the first thing I wanted to do is well,
Speaker 2: step one is proved to myself that it works. So
Speaker 2: that was really twenty four was mostly like, you know,
Speaker 2: get it to work to the point that I'm happy
Speaker 2: to share it with somebody else. My second goal was
Speaker 2: to get beta's out by the end of December, and
Speaker 2: so currently there are eleven there's eleven beta sites, the
Speaker 2: last two of which I still have to ship. So
Speaker 2: there's nine betas that are actually out in the field
Speaker 2: right now, two more to get shipped, and all the
Speaker 2: feedback I've gotten so far, there's nothing in any of
Speaker 2: the feedback that would lead me to change anything on
Speaker 2: the hardware, or even the firmware for that matter, although
Speaker 2: I can think of more things I want to do,
Speaker 2: but for right now, I think it's pretty pretty stable
Speaker 2: and solid. Then most of what I've been doing in
Speaker 2: the last couple of weeks has been documentation because there's
Speaker 2: one hundred and one questions that people have, and so
Speaker 2: I've been trying to capture all those that one of
Speaker 2: the reasons for the beta is to find out what
Speaker 2: you know, what people like or what they don't like,
Speaker 2: or what's working and not working. And so far, so far,
Speaker 2: everything is working the way it's supposed to be working,
Speaker 2: and most of the feedback are things that I just
Speaker 2: haven't gotten to yet, which is good. So anyway, that's
Speaker 2: sort of the background. I'm My goal was always to
Speaker 2: have them available for sale at hand Bension, so I'll
Speaker 2: be at hand Benson this year. I'll have them with
Speaker 2: me for sale, but based on the way things are
Speaker 2: going right now, I will probably have them for sale
Speaker 2: before then. So most likely I would say February March
Speaker 2: probably they'll be put up for sale. I stop to
Speaker 2: figure out the final pricing for all this and and
Speaker 2: how you know, what all the variations are like. For example,
Speaker 2: my first thought a long time ago was I'll just
Speaker 2: put instructions on how to configure a raspberry pie, and
Speaker 2: you know, people will just have their own raspberry pie.
Speaker 2: They'll just get the Raspberry Pie motherboard and then do
Speaker 2: the pie themselves. Everybody in the beta group are experienced,
Speaker 2: you know, they've they've done this sort of thing before.
Speaker 2: They they're raspberry Pie Linux not a problem. Everybody was like,
Speaker 2: this is a pain in the neck, so really totally,
Speaker 2: you know, And it turns out that the documentation was
Speaker 2: actually not too bad, and it's like do this, do this,
Speaker 2: do this, do this. You know, in a half hour,
Speaker 2: you're done building the image. But you know, even people
Speaker 2: that are very experienced are like, like, I'm too busy
Speaker 2: with life to do this. Can I just get it?
Speaker 2: And so I so I decided that, you know, I'll
Speaker 2: just distribute the pre created SD card image like you imaged.
Speaker 2: And in fact, I bought a pile of Raspberry Pie
Speaker 2: threes because I know for sure there's people that are like,
Speaker 2: I don't want to screw the thing into the board,
Speaker 2: I just want to get it. So what I'm gonna do, Jason,
Speaker 2: is is for those people who just want to spend
Speaker 2: the money and get it and literally go click, click,
Speaker 2: and it works. Then I'll have everything pre configured, you know,
Speaker 2: Raspberry Pie, I'm out of the board, SD card installed,
Speaker 2: everything is, you know, done, click it together, You're done.
Speaker 2: And for those people who who are thinking, you know,
Speaker 2: this is great, but I want to spend as little
Speaker 2: as I can, and I've got stuff you know, I
Speaker 2: got a Raspberry Pie, I've got a you know whatever,
Speaker 2: I got cables, you know, then I'll probably have some
Speaker 2: of this stuff as kind of not kit form but
Speaker 2: like pieces. So you know, you can get the Raspberry
Speaker 2: Pie board without the Raspberry Pie or you can get
Speaker 2: it with it. But if you get it with it,
Speaker 2: I get to pay somebody to create the image and
Speaker 2: install it and test it. So that's not free. So
Speaker 2: it costs me money to do that, so I have
Speaker 2: to like jack up the price. So if you want
Speaker 2: to do your own, that's great. You want me to
Speaker 2: do it for you, that's fine too, it just costs
Speaker 2: a little bit more. So right now I'm shooting for
Speaker 2: every one of the modules in the like fully baked,
Speaker 2: you know, mounting hardware, everything ready to go out the door,
Speaker 2: probably somewhere in the two hundred dollars price range per module. Okay,
Speaker 2: So what that means is is if you wanted the
Speaker 2: most basic configuration, you'd get the Pie module and let's
Speaker 2: say the gpio or the COAC switch module. So it's
Speaker 2: like four hundred bucks to start and two hundred bucks
Speaker 2: to increment up every additional module, or if you want
Speaker 2: to you know, do it, diy a bunch yourself and
Speaker 2: you know BYO raspberry pie and all that sort of thing,
Speaker 2: then maybe starting around three hundred. So that's kind of
Speaker 2: the price range that that I'm looking at.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's fair for all it for all it does,
Speaker 1: that's pretty good, I think so.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean the thing the challenge here in doing
Speaker 2: a ham radio business is like, if you built this
Speaker 2: thing and sold it to the commercial world, you'd charge
Speaker 2: more than twice the price or something. Yes, yeah, but
Speaker 2: you know, we're all Hams, and we're all cheap and
Speaker 2: and you know we want the good thing, but we
Speaker 2: don't want to pay any money for it. So you know,
Speaker 2: I'm sort of riding that fine line between you know,
Speaker 2: this being financially successful and just a pain in the neck.
Speaker 1: Sure, yeah, totally cool. Has anyone ever mentioned adding a
Speaker 1: camera to it so that you can remotely monitor your hamshack?
Speaker 2: No, that's never come up. You certainly could do that.
Speaker 2: I mean, I know a lot of remote guys who
Speaker 2: do do that.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's not an uncomping I yeah, I know,
Speaker 1: I know a couple of remote guys that have just
Speaker 1: like you know, I mean, they have temperture sensors like
Speaker 1: I know one guy who has a house in the
Speaker 1: mountains in Colorado eleven hundred feet above sea level. I
Speaker 1: want to know eleven eleven thousand feet above sea level,
Speaker 1: I think, And and he has a tower out there,
Speaker 1: and he's got it. He's got the tower set up
Speaker 1: for to become a one hundred and sixty meters vertical antenna.
Speaker 1: But he's got a I think a step ir on
Speaker 1: top of it. But he's got the total remote control
Speaker 1: system set up, and I think he just pieced it
Speaker 1: all together himself. He runs flex mostly and and he
Speaker 1: he was talking. He was like, man, I sure would
Speaker 1: like to see what's going on, but the most important
Speaker 1: thing that being in the mountains of Colorado. He wants
Speaker 1: a temperature sensor. He's like, I don't want it to
Speaker 1: get too cold, you know, if the heater stops working
Speaker 1: or whatever. So temperature sensor is really important. But it
Speaker 1: is nice. It would be nice to be able to
Speaker 1: see your hamshack from you know.
Speaker 2: So there's two reasons human you kind of want to
Speaker 2: use a camera that I've seen this is an industrial
Speaker 2: kind of IoT applications. I've seen this done a lot
Speaker 2: where people put cameras up to look at their equipment.
Speaker 2: They do it for two reasons. One is they want
Speaker 2: to see the equipment to see if it's like physically intact. Right.
Speaker 2: So there's that mechanical side of it. I get that,
Speaker 2: and that's that's a thing. But a lot of times
Speaker 2: I've seen people have like a panel of meters and
Speaker 2: a camera looking at the meters. I'm replacing that. True, So,
Speaker 2: and it's much more useful than having a camera. So,
Speaker 2: and the reason is, first of all, it takes less data, right,
Speaker 2: you can actually you could, by the way, let's say
Speaker 2: you have a repeater site or a remote radio site
Speaker 2: where you have no Internet, which is kind of hard
Speaker 2: to do with a like a flex, but let's say
Speaker 2: it's a repeater you got no internet. You could put
Speaker 2: a like a twenty year old packet TNC on a
Speaker 2: two meter repeater at the repeater site and run all
Speaker 2: of the data that goes from the Raspberry Pie to
Speaker 2: the remote site over a low bandwidth data link. It'll
Speaker 2: work fine. Yeah, So you can actually monitor and control
Speaker 2: stuff remotely using a Laura radio, using a DNC or whatever.
Speaker 2: So you know, there is that aspect of it as well.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's just something I thought of when you were
Speaker 1: talking about all the stuff that could be added to it.
Speaker 2: So, by the way, one thing we didn't really talk
Speaker 2: about is automation. Okay, so so far, what we've really
Speaker 2: looked at is kind of the core capability, which is
Speaker 2: I want to have a dashboard that shows me what's
Speaker 2: going on, and that's great, and you know, if you
Speaker 2: want to go control something that's appropriate, or if you
Speaker 2: want to just take a glance at what's going on,
Speaker 2: that's fine. In the case let's say your your your
Speaker 2: friend's case up in the mountains where he wants to
Speaker 2: know when it's too cold. Well, you can keep looking
Speaker 2: at the dashboard every three minutes, or you could add
Speaker 2: some automation and node red. So this is really where
Speaker 2: node red is super powerful. So you could enhance the
Speaker 2: flow that I provide by stitching a few things together. So,
Speaker 2: for instance, it's very easy to do something like I
Speaker 2: scrape the data from the modules every thirty seconds, so
Speaker 2: you'll get the temperature every thirty seconds. Now all I'm
Speaker 2: doing is displaying that on the gauge. You could add
Speaker 2: a little couple of objects to that flow and you
Speaker 2: can say, okay, if the temperature is below X, then
Speaker 2: do something. So if the temperatures below X, turn on
Speaker 2: the heater, or if the temperatures below X, send me
Speaker 2: a text message. If the temperatures below X, then you know,
Speaker 2: I don't know, do something. So it's very easy to
Speaker 2: start to connect these things together to really automate stuff.
Speaker 2: So like another an example, I have a user right
Speaker 2: now who has a repeater site and they have a
Speaker 2: power amplifier on the repeater and it's like a it's
Speaker 2: like a two hundred something want Motorola quantar or whatever thing.
Speaker 2: What they want to do is they want to be
Speaker 2: able to take the amplifier out of the circuit and
Speaker 2: run low power if the amplifier fails. So what they're
Speaker 2: doing is putting co X which is on either side
Speaker 2: of the amplifier and the WANT meter, and if the
Speaker 2: reflect power ever it gets above a certain amount, they'll
Speaker 2: take the power amplifier out of the circuit and just
Speaker 2: run straight through and then send a text message to say,
Speaker 2: you know, hey, that the reflective power is too high.
Speaker 2: We've just taken the PA out of the circuit. Or
Speaker 2: you could you could imagine you could do the same thing.
Speaker 2: Let's say AC power fails, you're on battery backup. You're
Speaker 2: on battery backup. Turn down the power or disable the
Speaker 2: PA or you know whatever steps you would take to
Speaker 2: switch to the low power operational mode, and all that
Speaker 2: stuff could be done automatically with in like you know,
Speaker 2: five minutes with no dread.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's a good idea. Hmm. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: think this is a great project. It's I didn't quite
Speaker 1: understand what the purpose was when you first emailed me,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, because you you had mentioned repeater controller.
Speaker 1: I'm like, okay, yeah, that that's that's fine. I don't
Speaker 1: I don't own a repeater side. But now that I
Speaker 1: see this capability here in the remote ham shack, that's
Speaker 1: this is a really neat tool, I think. I think
Speaker 1: there there's a lot of room for expansion, a lot
Speaker 1: of room for adding new things to it, to see
Speaker 1: what people want to do. So I think this is
Speaker 1: a great project. George. I appreciate your time today.
Speaker 2: Sure I got one little, one little other side application
Speaker 2: I could touch, sure of.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so here's one other thing. Do you have a
Speaker 2: stream deck?
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 2: Okay, now you know.
Speaker 1: I act Yeah, yeah, I had I ran the software
Speaker 1: version on an Android tablet for a while now it
Speaker 1: worked fine, but yeah, I've never never purchased the actual hardware.
Speaker 2: So in my shack, I have one of the antenna
Speaker 2: switches in the shack, and I have a stream deck.
Speaker 2: So for those people who don't know, stream deck is
Speaker 2: a little box with buttons on it, and it's normally
Speaker 2: used to run programs like OBS or b whatever. But
Speaker 2: what I wanted to do is I want to do
Speaker 2: all my antenna switching either through the web page or
Speaker 2: through the push buttons. And so I wrote a little
Speaker 2: utility that runs on Windows and so you press a
Speaker 2: button and the utility translates that button press into the
Speaker 2: command that will switch their antenta relay so on. You know,
Speaker 2: right in front of me in the shack, I have
Speaker 2: the stream deck, and each stream deck button has a
Speaker 2: picture of the antenna or actually the radio. I have
Speaker 2: one in that case, I have won antenna and four radios.
Speaker 2: So I've got a little flex icon, a little allocraft icon,
Speaker 2: a little icon icon, and then auxiliary and so I
Speaker 2: just I pressed the mechanical button. I don't look at
Speaker 2: the web page for this, I just pressed the mechanical button.
Speaker 2: On the you know, on the stream deck, and it
Speaker 2: sends the command to the network to switch the antenna. Really,
Speaker 2: so there's there's all kinds of ways you could use
Speaker 2: this stuff.
Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah, definitely, that's that's fun. I've heard of
Speaker 1: people interfacing stream decks directly with their flex radio before
Speaker 1: to change stuff. Yeah, so yeah, that's that's not a
Speaker 1: new thing, but yeah, that's that's great. That will interface
Speaker 1: with that as well. So cool man. Well, can't wait
Speaker 1: to see how it progresses. And uh what what new
Speaker 1: things people come up with? And are you going to
Speaker 1: You said you're going to hamvention? What about hammcash any any.
Speaker 2: No, No, no plans to go there. Uh okay, but
Speaker 2: so ham Mention will be the first place where I'm
Speaker 2: going to show it off.
Speaker 1: Okay, okay, sounds good. Well, thanks for your time today, George.
Speaker 1: I appreciate it, and we're gonna follow this along as
Speaker 1: it goes. We'll get together again in a few months
Speaker 1: and see how you're doing with it.
Speaker 2: Thanks a lot, Jason, really appreciate it.
Speaker 1: Yep, thank you.
Speaker 3: Seventy three seventy three