The latest release of Raspbian Stretch for the Pi has replaced the familiar NTP application with a lightweight solution using timedatectl. As a result many of the online tutorials for adding a GPS USB dongle are out of date. After some[…]Click to read more..
Red Pitaya – Buyer Beware
My Red Pitaya failed recently after about 2 years of occasional use. It’s probably a 3.3V power regulator fault but the Red Pitaya team won’t supply component details and don’t have a repair option! So that’s £250 gone and not[…]Click to read more..
Raspberry Pi – Fixing a slow mouse
I recently changed my keyboard/mouse combo to a Perixx Periduo-712. When I restarted the Pi, I found that my mouse pointer had become very slow. A quick look around the Internet revealed a fix as follows: To speed-up the mouse,[…]Click to read more..
Packet Radio with the Raspberry Pi
Packet Radio TNC with the Raspberry Pi ** Updated 21-2-18 The Pi plus a USB soundcard is all you need to get started with Packet Radio. Instead of using a dedicated hardware TNC, the Pi can be coaxed to do[…]Click to read more..
PiFace on the Raspberry Pi – Problem Solved!
Introduction I recently wasted many hours trying to get the PiFace board to work with Python. I eventually discovered the root cause of the problem, so have documented it here, both for my own reference, and for anyone else who might[…]Click to read more..
Raspberry Pi – Running Spy Server as a service
Updated 26/3/18 to correct typo in Unit file The excellent Airspy Spy Server can easily be used as a service using SYSTEMD under Linux. This is a much better way to autostart the server as it gives you the facility[…]Click to read more..
Airspy – Spy Server Scripts
I’ve had Spy Server working very successfully with the Pi 3 for a while now and have written a few time-saving scripts that others might find useful. These can be found in the attached zip file. Here’s a quick run[…]Click to read more..
Recover Damaged Mac HFS+ disk with Linux
A friend of mine recently set me a challenge to recover 2TB of photo files from a Mac external drive that had failed. Fortunately, it was the USB to SATA converter that failed, so I could extract the bare drive[…]Click to read more..
RTL-SDR Server as a service on Raspberry Pi
Now that Raspbian has changed to Systemd for managing auto-starting programs and daemons, I thought it was about time I moved away from using rc.local to start the rtl-sdr server. If you ‘re currently using the rc.local file to start[…]Click to read more..
Raspberry Pi – Running a Python program after the desktop starts
To automatically run a python program when the LDXE environment loads, you need to add a command to the lxsession autostart file. Here’s the process: Open the autostart file: sudo nano /home/pi/.config/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart Add this new line: @python yourscript.py NB: Obviously, you replace[…]Click to read more..
RSGB Convention 2017 – Pi in the Shack Slides
The link below will take you to a PDF copy of the slides that I used for my presentations at the 2017 RSGB Convention. Pi in the Shack-Mike Richards RSGB 2017
bhi ParaPro EQ20-DSP Sound file
The following audio files have been provided to support my reviews of the bhi ParaPro EQ200-DSP power amplifier with noise reduction and parametric filtering. The first recording shows an aeronautical VOLMET signal as folows: 0-20 seconds – Origian signal 20-40[…]Click to read more..