[Xastir] Raspberry Pi with Xastir

[Ray Wells]

I had terrible stability problems with a Pi in service as an aprs Igate. 
Ten days was the best I could get out of it before a crash but the crash 
could have been after a couple of hours or so. The installation was 
Wheezy with kernel ax25 compiled on the machine and running dixprs as 
the gateway software. The Pi drove an approved powered hub with 2A p/s 
and I used wi-fi to access the LAN. It was the wi-fi that crashed every 
time. I moved away from the Pi because I needed reliability. I had 
looked at power supply issues, but obviously not in enough detail.

Months later I revisited the Pi for adsb and found that with with one 
particular 700mA mobile charger the Pi was stable and the DTV dongle was 
happy, without the need for a hub. If I moved to any of a number of 
other supplies the adsb program dump1090 would crash within seconds. The 
phone charger was putting 5.22v on the Pi whereas the other supplies 
were just under 5v. It seemed obvious that there was a supply issue. I 
ended up using a Murata 5v 1.5A smps to give me 5v but I still wasn't 
happy with the voltage for the USB sockets when under load. I shorted 
all Polyfuses on the Pi and have never looked back. Current uptime is 16 
days, following a forced mains reset for something else.

Enthused by the adsb success I again put a Pi into service for the aprs 
gateway. I tried another Murata smps but it was just under 5v and I felt 
uneasy about that (low) supply voltage. I now have a linear 3.5A supply 
using an LM350, and adjusted to 5.1v. Again, I'm using Wheezy with ax25 
compiled on the machine and, dixprs. The only thing plugged into the Pi 
is the four port USB/RS232 adaptor. Uptime is now 11 days and I feel 
confident about the stability.

My two running Pi's both use ethernet rather than wi-fi, the bridge to 
the wireless LAN being via a D-Link wireless/ethernet bridge with two 
ethernet ports.

I now believe that supply requirements for the Pi are more stringent 
under some conditions than I would have believed.

Ray vk2tv



On 24/01/14 14:35, Lee Bengston wrote:
> I thought I had a stability problem with my Raspberry Pi.  However, after
> changing the IGate to use Xastir, I've completed over 19 days of continuous
> operation without a hitch.  The previous software never lasted more than 15
> days before everything would freeze up.  Sometimes I would only get about
> 10 days before it would quit.  I had to cycle the power in order to get
> back up and running.
>
> The other software package didn't quit on me like that when I used it on an
> x86 machine, so for a long time I blamed the Pi.  Perhaps the issue is
> related to a dependent library that is specific to the Raspbian
> distribution - who knows.  Anyway, good job, Xastir developers!
>
> Lee - K5DAT
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