[Xastir] Raspberry Pi with Xastir

[Kris Wotipka]

Just my nickel,

I have been running a pi now for about 3 months.  It has the TNCxPi 
daughter board on it as well as the Edimax Thumbnail Wifi dongle and a 
USB to RS232 converter that is plugged into a KPC3.  Xasistr is 
monitoring the TNCxPi and I login via Chicken of the VNC (OSX) and a 
tight VNC server (serial to TNCxPi).  I use the ax25 stack with I don't 
remember what now on the KPC3 (it's late here). That listens to the ISS 
downlink freq and logs packets for some sat data I am tracking.

Long story short, the whole mess is run off of a 12V cigarette adapter I 
got from Lowes.  Just tapped it into the same 12VDC that runs the radio 
on the TNCxPi.

I also have a Pi that is running the AirPi daughter board and same wifi 
that has been running about the same time off of a Lowes USB 2A/1A dual 
output wall wart.

Both sell for around $8 and I have never put a voltmeter on either to 
see what they are actually putting out.  The only thing I have had 
issues with is the NooElec SDR dongles.  If they are on a USB extension, 
they seem to crap out.  Or if you have them mixed in with some low speed 
devices (keyboards, mice, etc) power or not, they don't seem to like 
that either.

Yet another Pi has been running dump1090 for about a month now with just 
the RTL and thumbnail wifi on the same type of Lowes USB PS.


So, I guess you could say I like those PS units.

kw
KD5QYV




On 1/23/14 6:06 PM , Ray Wells wrote:
> 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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