QRSS GRABBER WITH
THE RASPBERRY PI
2017
For our "Barefoot Power" or better, "Little Toe Power" QRSS signals I am using the Raspberry Pi already a long time as a grabber in combination with Lopora. What a huge difference compared to my first grabber with desktop PC, 100 watt power supply and noisy fan!!!
And, handy after power failures, the grabber automatically boots after a power reset. So it can operate without monitor, keyboard and mouse!
The Raspberry Pi can be used as a grabber for QRSS signals.
One Raspberry Pi can even control 3 grabbers at the same time!
- A standard box for electric wiring as housing (here with removed lid) is used. In the nice but small commercial housing for the Raspberry, its temperature becomes approximately 15 C higher than in this box and it is cheaper too.
- Just below the box you can see the grey coloured HDMI-VGA converter, costs 8 euros. I got 3 VGA flatscreen monitors for free, as the owners wanted to have a new monitor with a HDMI input!
- At the right you can see the USB audio input device. It is very important to connect it directly to the Raspberry and not via an USB hub. Via an USB hub I had much more radio interference and even some interference at the audio connection from the receiver to the USB audio device.
- At the bottom you can see a USB hub. The keyboard and mouse are connected to it. In this way, it is easy to disconnect the mouse and keyboard and eliminate some radio interference.
- The 5 volt mains adapters are a problem, they last never longer than 0,5 to 1,5 years!
- Do not use WLAN. When using WLAN instead of UTP, I have to reset the Raspberry Pi 1x to 2x weekly.
- Sometimes, the Raspberry Pi becomes unstable. Then I have to clean the USB connectors between the USB audio device and the Raspberry Pi to solve that problem.
- Restart the Raspberry when you exit programs that run under Python (Lopora for example!). The Raspberry Pi becomes slower, something invisible keeps the processor busy!
- Lopora is certainly not a user friendly program and also not the best grabber program in the world. I made it for myself to get some experience with the Python programming language (not too difficult and simple syntax!) and with FFT calculations. And it is great that I can make my own modifications to the program for some interesting experiments!
See: http://www.qsl.net/pa2ohh/grabber.htm
Required Python version:
- Python version 3, already installed on the Raspberry Pi.
Installation
Download and Unzip the next file:
In the directory "InstallationForPython3" of the unzipped file, you will find the file "README-NOOBS_v1_8_0-installation.txt". It contains the full description of how you have to install and configure all the required software. Use the latest version of the NOOBS, it might be that there is a newer one available.
The data in the directory "QRSSdirectory" has to be stored in your own working directory of the Raspberry Pi.
The data in the directory "Scriptfiles" contains various scriptfiles and are all explained in the installation text.
Information about Lopora: http://www.qsl.net/pa2ohh/11lop.htm
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