Getting Repository Going and Going Open Source

[abcrawford]

@AngelTomas we can continue our discussion here so others joining in the project later can get up to speed quickly. As you can see I've added you as a contributor to the project. Any help you can provide will be greatly appreciate and help to move this project forward. I will post again soon.

[AngelTomas]

Ok @alleghenycreative, we read here.

[abcrawford]

@AngelTomas I have setup a hardware folder and uploaded my Eagle files to the repository. 1) You will need to make sure that you are working under the BETA branch and not the master branch or you won't see the folder. 2) Then you can go to the HARDWARE folder. Under there I have v0.1 and v0.2. Right now they are identical. v0.1 is for record keeping, v0.2 is for you to modify and commit your changes to.

You will need to use GIT, Git for Windows, Git for Mac, or some other GIT sync tool to pull the repository down to your local machine. I am using Git for Mac. Once you have it on your machine, you can add the HARDWARE folder to your Eagle Library as one of your project folders. Then you can modify the v0.2 files and commit them when they are done or have significant updates.

If you want to try getting that setup first. then I can explain the circuits a little more. The file is pretty much rough ideas of different sub circuits. Nothing is finalized at this time. Let me know if you have any questions with that part. Thanks.

[AngelTomas]

Wow. @alleghenycreative Project is very advanced! That is good!

Now, I have some comments, you know as well as I do that before a power failure in the rpi could be a complete failure of the SD card, corrupt files, etc.. It would be nice to complete the installation with the possibility of adding a battery (12Vcc 3Ah) to induce a shutdown ordered the rpi, and when power returns starting with services and daemons.

I put this scheme can offer such excellent results that have given me in my AutoRaspi for APRS. This scheme is in *. sch but since ExpressSCH, will work to introduce in Eagle, you check and if we include what you think is appropriate. In any case I can export to BMP and see it quickly, I will try to upload it to GitHub.

Thanks Aaron

[abcrawford]

Thanks @AngelTomas. Glad to see you got the GitHub repository working for you!

I definitely don't disagree with you about an auxiliary power source. You also raise a good point about auto shutdown. I think the first thing to concentrate on is the core switching circuit and build some prototypes of that circuit first. My initial goal is to make it as small as possible. Ideally I would like it to fit on a PCB that can mount on top of the RPi....like a PI Face board. It should contain everything it needs to operate two handheld radios so it could be used as a temporary field repeater.

That said, I think the project will eventually lead to multiple interface boards. A compact model and a larger more feature packed model (i.e. Echo Link, Multiple Ports, etc). Of course that could outgrow the Pi into something like the Beaglebone Black that has more GPIO.

On my schematics, the gray area in the audio section is incomplete. I am thinking we are going to need an audio mixer circuit there. On the initial prototype you can probably omit the DTMF decoder section as there is currently no software support for that yet. I have to breadboard that circuit and do the coding. I am also not so sure that the relay switching is needed, I am just trying to ensure maximum compatibility between different radios. I think there needs to be a COR circuit for radios, such as handhelds, that do not have a COR output.

In the assets sub folder, I did include another schematic of a basic repeater controller to borrow idea from in development of the circuits. I hope to be as efficient as possible with the circuit design so we can fit it in a small board. We may have to go to SMD devices and a multi-layer board to pull it off.

Maybe for the power loss detection we could use a small. 3.3 volt SMD voltage regulator on the primary power input that would feed to a GPIO input pin through a current limiting resister. Then the primary power and aux power would run through the same 5 volt regulating circuit. I definitely want to be able to operate the whole thing off 12 volts primary power.

Just some thoughts. Thanks.

[abcrawford]

Also to answer your question @AngelTomas that you mentioned in email the other day about the 8GB card size. Right now that is because the card that I am using is an 8GB card and when I make an IMG file from the card it keeps it the same size. Unless I can figure out a way to reduce the image size to what is actually used. If I could we could probably go down to a 4GB card. I think it is currently around 2.4 GB used on the card. I am sure we could clean some of the unused packages, but we may add other packages as other features are added in the future.

[abcrawford]

@AngelTomas Just wanted to let you know I am working on getting my code cleaned up to the point I can start to distribute it. I was working on it some last night. Hope to have something soon that you can work with.

[AngelTomas]

@alleghenycreative , Hi Aaron. I've been offline for a few days here have been holidays, and others because they've been a little busy, I'll read through the thread. I've also been doing a partition with Windows, to work easily with GitHub and Eagle.

[abcrawford]

@AngelTomas, Not a problem at all. I've been busy also. Just wanted to update you just incase you were wondering my status. I've also been working on some documentation for it as well to help with setup...this will be used when I make it available to more people. I am starting to setup some milestones and "tasks" in GitHub to outline the immediate goals.

No sure how far you are with with the windows partition. Another option might be doing a virtual machine. Those have worked pretty well for me.

Hope to have some software ready for you soon. Thanks.

[abcrawford]

@AngelTomas I also did some testing with the SD card to try and get the size down. I shrunk the size of the EXT4 partition to just under 4GB; however my image program is still seeing it as 8GB including the 4GB of unallocated space. I will play with it some more later. I am able to zip the original 8GB backup IMG down to just over 1GB.

[AngelTomas]

@alleghenycreative I've added two trimmers for simple equalizing audio levels. For rpi will not need to have software control. I remember you were looking for simplicity, so I have not referred to a mixer with operational circuits. (741) Please, if I'm doing something wrong I hope you correct me.

[abcrawford]

@AngelTomas, Absolutely. That's why I had the gray box in that area because that part of the circuit wasn't really designed yet. Trying to keep it simple to start with...eventually may have two or more PCB designs depending on the desired functionality. As you can see in Eagle, I haven't really assigned values to many of the components yet. I don't know if you want to start working on that when you have time. Hopefully by the time you have a good basic circuit design together, I should have an IMG file for you to load the software, then you can start prototyping and trying it out for real. If you look in the project WIKI here on GitHub you can see that I am also working on some documentation for you and those who join in the future.

These are the primary two documents, not done yet but getting there: Getting Started Contributor Guidelines

If you want to commit anything to the hardware folder, I will be sure to take a look. Thanks for you help!

[abcrawford]

@AngelTomas, Just wanted to give you a quick update of where I'm at. I may be changing the core code that operates the radios. This would affect part of the circuit design. I was doing some research on a FUTURE feature I wanted to add...EchoLInk...and how I could integrate it within Linux. I discovered SVXLink which is does it well but all can function as repeater control logic. It supports most what I have already done and many features I plan to add. It does DTMF decoding and CTCSS within software which will greatly simplify the circuitry on the interface board. The big difference is the PI will need a USB sound card. RX audio will go into the input and all processing/audio mixing will be done in software then the audio out will go into the TX. The radio will be switch with GPIO like it is now. I am testing it now on the PI, I am working on getting the GPIO switching to work. If this is successful, I am going to integrate my Web Control Panel with it. I will keep you posted with my status.

I also got the OS size down to a 4 GB partition so I can make a 4GB IMG file. When I ZIP it up it is about 1GB.

[abcrawford]

@AngelTomas, Not sure if you are still interested in being involved, so I was checking in with you. As you may be aware the core system of the controller has changed from my python scripts to using svxlink. This will affect the hardware design some...simpler, as well as require a USB sound card for audio in and out.

I also wanted to make you aware that I have restructured the GitHub repository. The project now has multiple repositories that live under an organization "OpenRepeater" that lives here: https://github.com/OpenRepeater. Under that you will find sub repositories for different aspects of the project. The eagle files that we were previously working on have been moved to https://github.com/OpenRepeater/hardware and live in folder called "_OLD RPI Hardware". I plan to have multiple folders under this repository for different hardware interfaces (i.e. Raspberry Pi, Beaglebone Black). Let me know if you have any questions.

[gavargas22]

Hey guys, just checking in. What is the status of the project, I was looking over some of the issues, what else is there to do?

[abcrawford]

@gavargas22, Thanks for checking in. I have some offline improvements going on right now as time permits. I am working on making some UI improvements and testing some basic hardware, things that will be needed by others to create a basic functioning system. I plan to post that to Github as soon as I get it done. @mathewpeterson has been working on building a framework for the web app to clean up that code.

Here are some areas that could be of help to me and help to speed the process along: One of the new UI features I am working on is better ID customization. Part of that includes allowing the user to choose how many WPM and Frequency of the CW ID. These are variables that get passed into the SVXLink config file. On the front end of the UI I want to create a preview feature to allow the user to test the different setting until they find something that suites there needs. I've already started simplifying an HTML/Javascript approach based off of this site: http://morsecode.scphillips.com/jtranslator.html If you are interested in refining that let me know.

We also need to build some scripts which will probably use both PHP and Shell to start and restart the SVXLink server when the settings are change. I assume you are using the PI image that I created? This has a popup that is designed for this, but the backend is not fully developed yet to handle that task.

Let me know if you can help in either of those areas. Thanks.