Posts Tagged ‘Raspberry Pi’

Use a Mac to Set Up DSTAR Commander on Your DVMEGA / Raspberry Pi Hotspot

Posted: 2016-12-05 in Ham Radio, How To, Unix Geekery
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This post will document how to setup the DSTAR Commander image for use on a Raspberry Pi / DVMEGA hotspot.  I use a Mac.  Theses instructions demonstrate how I set up my hotspot using a Mac.  These hotspots are great to use and enable you to talk across the globe using an HT on low power.

Outline:
  1. Burn image to SD Card
  2. Boot your Pi and VNC into it
  3. Set up DSTAR Repeater
  4. Set up ircddb Gateway
  5. Set up text and email of system information
  6. Create Remote Control App
  7. Reboot and Test
  8. Secure your Pi (Change user password and VNC password)
  9. Change the Hostname of your Pi
  10. References
What you will need:
  • 16 GB or greater SD card. I love this Lexar card. I don’t recommend PNY. The one I bought failed in a couple of months.
  • SD Card Reader (The USB reader that came with my Lexar works great).
  • G4KLX image. I have used many of them and prefer DSTAR Commander.
  • A VNC Program. I use Jump Desktop on the Mac and iOS they all sync together and work great!
  • The Unarchiver application, free in the Mac App Store.
  • Software that will let you see devices connected to your network via ethernet. If, like me, you are using an Apple Time Capsule the Airport utility will only show you devices connected wirelessly. Use the iPhone app Fing to get the ip and MAC address of your Pi.

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Use SSH and dd to Remotely Backup a Raspberry Pi

Posted: 2016-11-25 in Ham Radio, How To, Unix Geekery
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Introduction

I love the Raspberry Pi! I am currently using one as a local DSTAR hotspot. It works great. I have tried several different images (Maryland-DSTAR, Western, and DSTAR Commander). I think I have settled on DSTAR Commander. I think I finally have everything working exactly how I want it to.

When making tweaks to the system, it is very important to make a backup of your current system so that you can easily go back to where you started if you messed something up. Additionally, if your SD Card fails (and it WILL), having a backup will enable you to quickly get your system back online.

I used to have to shut down the pi, pull the SD Card out, find my SD Card adapter, plug it into my Mac, make a backup, and then reverse the process to get my system online again.  Those days are over. You can make a backup of your pi and have the backup written to your regular PC all from the command line. Here is how to do it.

Bottom Line Up Front:

From your local machine, run the remote backup command:

ssh pi@xx.x.x.xx "sudo dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M | gzip -" | dd of=~/Desktop/pibackup.gz

If you ever need to use your back up you cannot do it remotely (at least that I know of).  You will need to insert the SD card into your local machine and run the following commands:

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk#
gzip -dc ~/Desktop/pibackup.gz | sudo dd of=/dev/rdisk# bs=1m conv=noerror,sync

Continue reading if you need much more detailed instructions on what this command does, what each piece of the command means, and how to get all of the necessary inputs.

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