My old Raspberry Pi 3 (without WiFI and Bluetooth) was too slow to do anything meaningful except run command line tools like RTL_433. I can’t imagine what would happen if I hooked up a monitor and tried to run something that a kid would to learn to compute. Definitely never did what it said on the tin.
So I broke down, after watching some of KM4ACK and OH8STNs raspberry pi videos, and purchased a Raspberry Pi 4 B with 4 GB ram.
I looked for a updated Pi3B+ instead because it has lower amperage requirements – effectively letting the 3B+ run off a 2.1 amp charger for most tablets. The 4 requires more amperage so you can’t use the millions of chargers that you already own. I think this was a major setback. Some say the Raspberry Pi foundation just wanted to sell their official power supplies. I half believe it because they’re a company and need to make money to pay their employees and grow, just like every other company regardless of how they position themselves using words like zillion dollar companies use like “sustainability” to make us feel good about planting a tree every time someone reboots a Pi. But I digress.
The Pi3B+ should have enough horsepower but it was priced nearly the same as an equivalent 4 so I went for the 4 for now. Not because I’m cheap, but because it’s ridiculous that they’d gouge you for the older 3 for the same price as a newer 4.
Rants aside, as a software engineer, I hemmed and hawed a lot about installing “someone else’s” suite of softwares since I’m a professional Unix hacker. But I agreed with his assessment of not using my spare CPU cycles (another ham image buries that in the fine print and doesn’t give you the option to easily kill that feature).
After reading some of the glue code he’s written I was still skeptical, especially since there’s no tests and it looks like he’s been teaching himself PHP, Python, BASH, etc. Good for him. I thought about rewriting everything for him to include full tests, etc but I realized this wasn’t the way and went ahead and ran his installer script on a fresh image (which is what I’d recommend because his scripts don’t honor existing software that’s installed and overwrite or error-out in some cases).
Build a Pi’s desktop background image copyright km4ack
I had a pleasant surprise at the glue code he wrote and wished my side-projects that I do for fun was this polished. I also enjoyed that his scripts compile from source rather than me downloading questionable binaries.
I also enjoy his use of various widgets that are readily available for Python, etc. I’m too quick to invent stuff myself (I’ve worked for too many large software companies with not-invented-here-syndrome) and then never actually get anything done, so kudos KM4ACK!
So at this point, I’ve run WSJT-X and gotten a few contacts (Goal #1).
The next Goal is to send and receive email over Pat Winlink over HF – regardless of the protocol/TNC.
Thanks, KM4ACK. And expect some pull requests 😉
73,
AE0RS
