W0CHP.net

With the myriad updates I’ve been making to my W0CHP-PiStar-Dash software, some installations (especially those that have been mucked/fucked with by the users) may refuse to fully update to the latest version of my software.

Fortunately, you can fix and reset your installation with one simple command.

Over the past week or so, I’ve been busy making many changes and improvements to my W0CHP-PiStar-Dash software…

New Versioning Scheme

W0CHP-PiStar-Dash has a new version display scheme…

Users are likely accustomed to the version being displayed something like this:

If you’re running a Pi-Star hot spot on a Raspberry Pi Zero rev.1 or rev.1.1 (1st gen.) board, consider replacing your Pi board with the new 2021 Raspberry Pi Zero 2. Especially if your using my W0CHP-PiStar-Dash version/fork of Pi-Star.

Since making W0CHP-PiStar-Dash available to the public, I refrained from accepting bug/issue reports & fixes, pull requests, patches, etc. After all, it was a tiny personal project I worked on, all alone.

However, my software has become more and more popular and more visible, and has exceed the installations I had envisioned. With so many users of my software now, I made the decision to enable bug reports, pull requests, etc. in the respective Git repositories.

My software touches and affects many people now, and I feel that it’s a smart idea to allow people to help with my pet project to make it even batter for users of my software…

Update - 12/13/2021:

I have merged this new feature into the main/master branch, as well as all other branches.

Sometimes, I only want to see the live caller of the current contact on my hot spots. Similar to how my Nextion and other OLED screens display pertinent caller information; but nothing else. No other data, no buttons, just the current information. Well, I’ve developed it and I’m currently testing this feature.

I’ve added a new feature to my W0CHP-PiStar-Dash software to help scratch yet another personal itch of mine. It’s called the “System Manager”.

You’ll find it in the admin section of the dashboard.

It manages/accomplishes two things (for now):

The shitty APRS Tier 2 website states, “Tier 2 is the optimum choice for all APRS-IS users.”

I call bullshit…

Building on my April 25, 2021 article, there are still caveats with the (new) TGIF Network platform and (W0CHP-)PiStar-Dash.

TGIF Manger in the admin panel can control linking and unlinking talk groups, thanks to Ty’s, KG5RKI, backward compatibility with the old API. However…

UPDATE, June 5, 2021:

Users running DMR should run pistar update, twice. This will fix the issue I found yesterday and described below.

This will add a mandatory MMDVMhost config section which seems to have originally been forgotten upsgtream by Andy. Oops!

I called it! 😆

It’s the early evening of June 4, 2021. The Venerable Andy, MW0MWZ, has updated the custom-compiled Pi-Star Binaries various times today. I manually updated my dev, QA and Test Pi-Star instances, and they all broke. DMRgateway is complaining about “bad packets” from MMDVMhost, rendering DMR non-functional…

The long-awaited TGIF Network Prime infrastructure was migrated into production today, April 25, 2021. However, one running W0CHP-PiStar-Dash or the official upstream Pi-Star software, will soon find out that the TGIF manager under the Admin section does not work (yet).