Running piHPSDR, linHPSDR on the Raspberry Pi

[John Peterson]

Hello All,

I have been having fun with my Hermes Lite 2 which I ordered in late July. FWIW, I picked the USPS shipping option and it arrived after about 8 or 9 days.

I have been using both Quisk and linHPSDR on an older laptop (ASUS X201e running Debian Stretch). I have been giving some consideration to buying an RPi 4B that can be dedicated to the HL2. (The laptop has my only decent webcam, so it gets used extensively for video conferencing these days, and those conflicts have been a bit of a pain as time goes on).

I see that Quisk runs fine on the RPi, but I had a question about the piHPSDR software:

The docs on the piHPSDR site (John Melton's version) talks about the Apache Labs Controller Kit that is an RPi with an LCD, some knobs, etc.

Does one have to assemble that kit to use piHPSDR, or will it build and function on a "bare" RPi using ssh/vnc to access it ???

Given that Raspbian is just Debian with some ARM tweaks, I am assuming that linHPSDR also works fine on the RPi ???

Any other hints or suggestions would be much appreciated...

P.S. My first RPi was the RPi2 Model B. Every time I bought a newer one, they came out with an upgraded model a few weeks, even days later. So... don't be surprised if the RPi 5 ships in the not too distant future!

73 de KD6EKQ John

["Christoph v. Wüllen"]

No problem to run piHPSDR on a „barefoot“ RaspPi.
Be sure to select „No controller“ in the pihpsdr start screen,
otherwise it may hang talking to non-existent hardware.

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[samuel kallmeyer]

Hello John,

did you check the files related to the controller part ?

https://github.com/g0orx/pihpsdr/tree/master/controller

73, F8ACB Samuel

[Matthew]

I believe that people have used linHPSDR on the rpi. In the sound options please select alsa (note, not soundio -> alsa). See here.

What size screen are you using? Some of my changes to linHPSDR made the window size larger than piHPSDR. See here.

Any problems with linHPSDR report back and I will see if I can fix it.

73 Matthew M5EVT.

[John Williams]

I run the rPi 4 with 4gb of memory using 2 displays using mini-hdmi to DVI adapter cables. Runs very well. I use both linHPSDR and PiHPSDR, preferring the later. All trivial to setup.

John W9JSW

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[Don [N5SKT]]

Do any of you run PiHPSDR and WSJTX? I am not getting the setup. I do see port 19090 up and when I set WSJTX to use that via rigctl it fails to find the "radio". I THINK I am supposed to do something with rigctld but have not found the instructions for that. I read somewhere that piHPSDR via WSJTX is receive only?

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Best Regards,

Don - N5SKT

["Christoph v. Wüllen"]

No, pihpsdr and wsjtx work well together. You have to „enable“ the CAT in the piHPSDR „RIGCTL“ menu.

For audio, create two loopback interfaces if both pihpsdr and wsjtx run on the RaspPi,
and select the „local audio“ and „local microphone“ options in the RX and TX menus.

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[John Peterson]

Thank you to all who replied to my post.

It sounds like running piHPSDR on a "stock" RPi is very straight forward (the key being to select "No Controller" in the start screen).

Regarding the display and resolution, I have found it most efficient to start a VNC server on the RPi. Then I can connect to it using a VNC client (like RealVNC) from any of my other systems that already have a nice display, mouse with scroll wheel, and keyboard.

I have been running a "headless" Raspberry Pi based WSPR beacon on 20 meters on a daily basis for just over 4 years now (an RPi 2B with the TAPR BPF shield and the WsprryPi software). I login to it maybe every few weeks at most, (or when my power was interrupted), so not having a dedicated monitor, etc. always connected to it is a huge win.

73 KD6EKQ John

P.S. Thanks for the tips on WSJTX, I am looking forward to doing some FT4/8, JT65 QSOs

["Christoph v. Wüllen"]

If the computer running wsjtx and the computer running piHPSDR are on the same network
(or even the same computer), then there is no need for socat, since you can directly
use TCP to connect. Choose the „openHPSDR piHPSDR“ rig model in wsjtx.

> Am 07.10.2020 um 23:38 schrieb Don [N5SKT] <n5skt...@gmail.com>:
>
> socat pty,link=/tmp/vtty,raw tcp:10.101.1.80:19090&
>
> Apparently that is the missing piece for cat control. The command above establishes the software link but then I have to create a virtual serial port so I can set the radio to T2000.

["Christoph v. Wüllen"]

I do not know exactly how efficient VNC is, but a simple „ssh X“ connection
is sufficient to have the pihpsdr window on the „main“ computer
(OK this is for linux and MacOS, but there are similar tools for windows)

You do not have access to the RPi desktop, but you have the piHPSDR window,
and have mouse and keyboard control.

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[Don [N5SKT]]

Yes, someone else sent me a step by step. When it says "serial port" I never imagined you could put a port # in there. So I will change that although socat does work but is just an extra step. Thanks much for the advice Christoph.   

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[Don [N5SKT]]

Really odd behavior, I rebooted the PI and I got back to no waterfall. After getting busy at the office, I noticed the Wifi address had changed and was now on my network instead of 10.10.10.10. After that, I got the waterfall. 

[John Peterson]

Hi Chistoph,

Connecting to the RPi with ssh, using X11 forwarding certainly works. It's also pretty simple, and potentially much less confusing than VNC.

I suspect that VNC is a little more efficient, but I have never done any comparisons. The clear advantages of VNC is that you do see a full desktop, and there are multiple VNC clients for Linux, Windows, OSX (RealVNC is probably the most popular). The VNC server can be also be configured so that you can access it with an ordinary web browser (although one needs to have Java enabled in the web browser, not to be confused with Javascript).

The downside of VNC is that it can be quite confusing (because it is highly configurable and can be deployed in so many different ways). There are also a number of security risks, although one is probably pretty safe if it is running and accessed from a local network behind a router/nat. The Raspberry Pi foundation has a primer (see link below).

Anyhow, just wanted to point out that one has many other options than a dedicated display that is directly connected to the RPi (which is fine too if one prefers that).

73 John KD6EKQ

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/remote-access/vnc/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Network_Computing

On Thursday, October 8, 2020 at 8:08:11 AM UTC-7 n5skt...@gmail.com wrote:

Really odd behavior, I rebooted the PI and I got back to no waterfall. After getting busy at the office, I noticed the Wifi address had changed and was now on my network instead of 10.10.10.10. After that, I got the waterfall. 

On Thu, Oct 8, 2020 at 8:49 AM Don [N5SKT] <n5skt...@gmail.com> wrote:

Yes, someone else sent me a step by step. When it says "serial port" I never imagined you could put a port # in there. So I will change that although socat does work but is just an extra step. Thanks much for the advice Christoph.   

On Thu, Oct 8, 2020 at 6:29 AM "Christoph v. Wüllen" <DL1...@darc.de> wrote:

I do not know exactly how efficient VNC is, but a simple „ssh X“ connection
is sufficient to have the pihpsdr window on the „main“ computer
(OK this is for linux and MacOS, but there are similar tools for windows)

You do not have access to the RPi desktop, but you have the piHPSDR window,
and have mouse and keyboard control.

[John Williams]

I have tried VNC from my windows laptop upstairs to the RPI downstairs using PiHPSDR. Did not work. Waterfall tore it up. Laptop was wifi connected on a non 5G wireless connection, RPi 4 with 4G is direct wired. On the same upstairs laptop I can run direct to the HL2 using Spark, SDRC and PowerSDR in receive without issues. I rarely transmit remote so never tested it. 

Just my experience. 

John W9JSW

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[Steve Haynal]

Hi John,

I run a remote HL2 at my sister's place 50km away. I use VNC. I only do digital modes and it has worked fine. At times the waterfall can be sluggish. Audio would be a challenge. This is over consumer (~50Mbs) internet service. I don't use a RPi but a lowend PC for the remote server.

73,

Steve

kf7o

["Christoph v. Wüllen"]

I also want to point out that you want to minimize network traffic in such a situation,
at least if the traffic to/from the HL2 is on the same cable as the VNC/X11 traffic.

I have no knowledge of VNC, but it is at least possible that an X window consumes
less bandwidth than a full screen.

Yours,

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[ron.ni...@gmail.com]

As yet another alternative, I installed xrdp on my headless Raspberry Pi 4, and then view the entire Raspberry Pi Buster desktop using the MS Remote Desktop viewer app from my Mac or iPad (on the local LAN).  I've run both Spark SDR and Quisk as well on my Pi 4 this way.  But other GUI SDR apps should work this way as well.

73,

Ron

n6ywu

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[John Peterson]

I did several VNC experiments over the weekend with linHPSDR, and they all worked fine for me. The RPi 4B is on order, so I used my old laptop to run linHPSDR and the VNC server.  The laptop is a bit dated, and has only Fast (100 Mbit/s) Ethernet. I tuned around for close to 3 hours through a VNC client on another computer (on my local net), and no waterfall/display problems, or HL2 related network hiccups.

For those that are having problems, I recommend you determine what encoding/protocol is getting negotiated between the VNC client (viewer) and server.  There are multiple encodings/protocols that trade off network bandwidth with display quality. Their availability varies depending on which server, clients you are using (and there are many, see link below).  Perhaps more importantly, is your (protocol) settings in the viewer. One to avoid is the "raw" encoding, which consumes enormous bandwidth.

The F8 key brings up the settings menu in TigerVNC viewer. In the "options" menu, I use the "auto select" option for encoding and color depth. Checking the "connection info" menu entry, it reports "tight" (tightvnc) as the negotiated encoding/protocol (which is a good one when it comes to minimizing bandwidth).

I have had good luck in the past running both the tightvnc and tigervnc servers on the RPi (I start it manually from the pi user account as needed).

One problem I did see was the sound was not being forwarded over the VNC connection. I have ran into this before when using VNC to connect to virtual machines. I'll need to dig up my notes on that, but I was able to get VNC sound working correctly in that case.

A good list of available (RFB/VNC) servers, clients;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_remote_desktop_software