Hamclock RPi project on Joggler? - FIXED

[jothebulb]

Hi,

New to the forum, but have had a Joggler for a while & have been looking for a use for this solid little gadget.

As a radio amateur, I like the Adafruit Huzzah project 'Ham Clock' over at the Clear Sky Institute: https://www.clearskyinstitute.com/ham/HamClock/ This takes a bunch of useful amateur radio data (UTC time, local weather, satellite passes, moon phases etc.) and displays it all on a simple display, minimum 800x480, with touchscreen control to change displays, enter data etc (the designer has even written the touch keyboard into the software).

I was going to buy the Huzzah kit, inc. touchscreen to build one, but then thought: if it is a. a small-is app & b. runs on Ubuntu/Linux, *perhaps* it would be perfect to get working on a Joggler?

I can get the Ubuntu/X11 working on my Windows 10 laptop using WSL2 & XLaunch/Xming (see image attached of it above, running on the laptop), so I know it will work on Ubuntu, but my question is that if I load the Bionic Kernel onto my Joggler (via a memory stick), is it possible to get this to run on the Joggler? I believe the display of the Joggler is 800x480, so should it/would it run without major modifications?

Thank you in advance for any help with this - it would be great to have this working on my desk like this & it would probably be of interest to other amateurs here.

Jo.

[jothebulb]

Just to follow up on my own post, naturally I have tried loading it to see if it worked!

The screen display remains at the standard display (IP address etc.), but opening the diagnostic file in the Ham clock software, I have:

argv[0] = hamclock

HamClock version 2.60
Can not open X Windows display

I assume I am missing a bit of the X Windows setup in order to write the screen display to the Joggler?

[jothebulb]

Fixed....

[Man in a van]

Well don't be a tease..tell us how !

and welcome

ronnie

[hawsey]

Fixed....

Ham clock Joggler copy.jpg

@jothebulb great job as a fellow amateur I'm interested in getting this working and also other ham radio uses for the joggler , I did have it working as both an SDR and picking up airplane beacons but via Android and although it worked it was not well .
Under Linux I'm sure SDR could work .
De 2E0HGP .

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[roobarb!]

Liking this, yes, more detail please!

On my list of things to do with a Joggler is to take the data from the FlightAware setup in the loft and display it. In all honesty it should be trivial to achieve given there's a map interface in SkyAware. I recently discovered that Apple's HomeKit supports issuing commands over SSH, so I can also have Joggler displays turning on and off based on room motion.

[jothebulb]

Hi,

Sorry for the silence, but I have been working away from home recently.

The steps I took to get the Hamclock working are outlined in a Wiki page I wrote for the amateur radio community, OARC, over at:

https://wiki.oarc.uk/hamclock_joggler

As I say, I am no coder, and this is probably a pretty ugly way to get this working, but I have built two versions on different memory sticks now, so the fundamentals must be right somewhere. Please do take a look & suggest improvements.

Jonathan

*Edited on 21/04/21 as the page address has changed

[hawsey]

Hi,

Sorry for the silence, but I have been working away from home recently.

The steps I took to get the Hamclock working are outlined in a Wiki page I wrote for the amateur radio community, OARC, over at:

https://wiki.oarc.uk/hamclock_running_on_an_o2_joggler

As I say, I am no coder, and this is probably a pretty ugly way to get this working, but I have built two versions on different memory sticks now, so the fundamentals must be right somewhere. Please do take a look & suggest improvements.

Jonathan

Thanks Jonathan I'll take a look , I'm doing the Full Licence course on OARC at the minute .


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[hawsey]

Hi,

Sorry for the silence, but I have been working away from home recently.

The steps I took to get the Hamclock working are outlined in a Wiki page I wrote for the amateur radio community, OARC, over at:

https://wiki.oarc.uk/hamclock_running_on_an_o2_joggler

As I say, I am no coder, and this is probably a pretty ugly way to get this working, but I have built two versions on different memory sticks now, so the fundamentals must be right somewhere. Please do take a look & suggest improvements.

Jonathan

Thanks Jonathan I'll take a look , I'm doing the Full Licence course on OARC at the minute .


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@jothebulb
When I click on the link it says page doesn't exist . Did you remove because you are making alterations to the instructions ?
I'll await your reply before trying .
Cheers

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[jothebulb]

Hi,

The OARC wiki had a bit of an edit to create pages for members, so the page got moved - I edited my original post to show the new page address, but your reply still shows the old one. Try this address instead:

https://wiki.oarc.uk/hamclock_joggler

Let me know how you get on; as I said, I am not a coder and getting it to work was trial-and error (mostly error). Let me know if you see a more elegant way to achieve this.

Jon.

[pete]

Using modded Joggler here to test.

While updating works Ok I see this error....

Processing triggers for initramfs-tools (0.130ubuntu3.11) ...
ln: failed to create hard link '/boot/initrd.img-5.4.70op.dpkg-bak' => '/boot/initrd.img-5.4.70op': Operation not permitted
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-5.4.70op

gzip: stdout: No space left on device
E: mkinitramfs failure cpio 141 gzip 1
update-initramfs: failed for /boot/initrd.img-5.4.70op with 1.
dpkg: error processing package initramfs-tools (--configure):
installed initramfs-tools package post-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
initramfs-tools
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

[Paul Webster]

"No space left on device"

Were you trying to install on the internal memory of the device?

[pete]

I got it running now fine even with the error. It is a boot partition error...

root@openframe:/home/pete# lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS
Release: 18.04
Codename: bionic

Code: Select all

pete# df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev            240M     0  240M   0% /dev
tmpfs            50M  4.4M   45M   9% /run
/dev/sda1        15G  2.0G   13G  14% /
tmpfs           247M     0  247M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs           247M     0  247M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs           500M     0  500M   0% /var/cache/apt
tmpfs           500M   72K  500M   1% /tmp
tmpfs            16M  156K   16M   1% /var/log
tmpfs           500M     0  500M   0% /var/lib/apt/lists
/dev/mmcblk2p1   41M   20M   22M  48% /boot
tmpfs            50M   28K   50M   1% /run/user/110
tmpfs            50M     0   50M   0% /run/user/1001

Code: Select all

pete# free -m
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:            492         233          22           7         236         238
Swap:           511           0         511

I also added a GPS stick to it and running GPSD

/pete# gpsd -V
gpsd: 3.17 (revision 3.17)

Runs fine now except for the error mentioned above when updating...

[jothebulb]

But you managed to get the HamClock running? Any major differences to the way I described the procedure?

[pete]

But you managed to get the HamClock running?

Yes

Any major differences to the way I described the procedure?
No.

Working perfectly!!! Thank you @jothebulb

Here is a screen shot via VNC remote.

[jothebulb]

Superb! It's great to see it running on another Joggler.



Jonathan
2E0LXQ

[pete]

Way back around 1965-1966 I was tinkering with amature radio.

Built a radio shack under my parent front porch at the time. Main receiver was a Hammerlund HQ-150 and Hallicrafters radio and used a Knight Kit 50 watt code transmitter. Strung up a dipole antenna from my parents house to a nearby building. I remember getting yelled at a bit for climbing on the roof to attach antennas at the time.

Looking forward to returning to that hobby someday soon.

[hawsey]

Great getting that working Pete .And good luck getting back on the airwaves .
I'm sure there are still lots of potential other uses for Jogglers and radio .
I have used mine for SDR on Android and also to pick up aircraft beacons , again on Android just because it was easy to set up but the results were just ok.
I suspect on Linux both would work a treat .
Also I used as a part of a MMDVM hotspot to view the main log in via Linux , this was using a pi zero .
There's a 32 bit build of a Ham package called Andys Ham that I would be interested to see just what would work .
Here's to plenty more uses in future .



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