Build Log: Pi-Star

Step 1: Flashing the SD Card

This was a large part of the time investment on this endeavor, surpassed only by the process of dialing in the offset. This shouldn't have taken as long as it did as I've don't this before in previous Pi projects. It's simple really, download the OS image, flash it to an SD car, and boot. I did this about three or four times on different computers wit different software before I finally decided try a different SD card and realized I had been using a 2GB card the whole time! this was the source of my troubles as these OS images really like to have 10GB or more. Once I swapped to a correctly sized SD things went as expected

Once I could access the dashboard it was time to enter all the settings. This is where I'm editing out a lot of time on this write-up. It was entirely a matter of following various youtube guides and entering the information required in the configuration page, not very exciting.

Step 2: Troubleshooting

Once all the configuration info was entered I though we'd be off to the races but when is it ever that simple? Every time I tried to connect to the hotspot I'd get a busy signal and show no local traffic on the dashboard. The first thing to do was ensure that the Pi could even see the MMDVM hat. To do this was a simple matter of using SSH within Pi-Star to talk to the Pi and check if it could identify the hat. Once that was established I attempted using different drivers and experimenting with different offset values for TX and RX. Eventually, through trial and error, I found that an offset of -600Mhz allowed the radio and the hat to communicate! Once that was complete I added a few talkgroups to the codeplug (which took a little trial and error itself), programmed the radio and I was off to the races!