Setting up Raspberry Pi with IRLP

It's been a little while since I posted anything here, but I've been working on a new hobby lately.  Amateur Radio.  One cool thing that I've been working on is using a Raspberry Pi with IRLP.  I didn't see a lot of steps of how to set this up online, and made some mistakes along the way.

Here's a link of items you'll need:
http://www.irlp.net/pi/

I already had a Raspberry Pi, and SD Card. I bought another charger and USB sound card through eBay.  You'll find better prices for 2amp chargers if you search for phone chargers instead of Raspberry Pi chargers.  The only thing I bought from the above link was the IRLP board and the modified parallel cable. 

I also purchased an already assembled cable that goes from my Yaesu FT-8800r to the IRLP board from here:  http://www.irlpcables.com/

I purchased the USB sound card on eBay.

Shipping speed was reasonable, considering I ordered all of this the week of Christmas from different sites.  Once everything came in is where I got a little confused.  My install was a little different than the recommended.  I had a setup that I liked already on my SD card. 

I made backup of what I already had on the SD card with my Ubuntu notebook with the following command (just in case I hosed my card). I followed the instructions here (the date command didn't work, so I renamed the backup to the current date manually): http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=91&t=46911

I took a peak at the IRLP Debain installer for the Rapsberry Pi to see if there was anything that would conflict with what I already had installed.  It removes a LOT of packages, but nothing that I thought would cause an issue with what I already had installed.  Here's how it worked for me and my Yaesu FT-8800r:

1. Follow the steps here to grab the debian installer for IRLP that's been tweaked for the Raspberry Pi: http://www.irlp.net/pi/directions.txt  I didn't remove my Pi user, I left it there, but when root was used in the directions, I used root.  I didnt upgrade anything either as i had already done so about a month ago.

2. Right when it said that it was going to install IRLP (after it goes through and removes packages), I quit the installer, ran the shutdown command as root, and then removed power from the Raspberry Pi.

3. I then connected the IRLP board to the Raspberry PI.  If you take a look at the cable that goes into the GPIO part of the PI, ensure the red part of the ribbon cable is towards the top of the GPIO board (the red cable when inserted onto the GPIO pins should be in the direction of the SD card, and not the yellow video jack).

4. To get the COS working with the Yaesu FT-8800r, move the jumper to high (near the H not the L).

5. Plud power back into the Pi and turn it back on.  Once you can get back into the Pi switch the user to root (if you logged in as Pi).  Change your directory to "/root".  You should see the installer for Debian in there, it'll be called irlp-install-debian.  You can run it like this: ./irlp-install-debian  That'll take you to where you last left off before you installed the hardware.

6.  The next part is going to walk you through essentially activating your IRLP board with the powers that be and will run a very basic test to check to see if things are running OK.  You'll need to know the name you used when you purchased the board, your call sign, the date of purchase of the board, and an e-mail address.  The IRLP installer will also rename the hostname on the Pi and assign you a node number.  Once done, I rebooted again just to make sure things were registering OK since I was using a non-typical install.

7.  I logged into the Pi via SSH.  Checked to see if I could ping out OK and if my other programs ran OK.  The next step was to run some more tests on the board to ensure things ran OK. 

Next is to run a sound test.  Ensure to plug headphones into the USB sound card to ensure sound works OK.  Type in alsaconf.  You should hear the old Linux test sound.  If that all works OK, plug your radio cable back into the sound card and run the following commands to ensure that communication is running OK between the board, pi, and your radio:

If you're still logged into the pi as root via SSH, switch your user to repeater:

Su repeater

Type in: /home/irlp/bin/readinput
And hit Enter.

Now (this is the part I misunderstood).  On the Yaesu FT-8800r you have to make two adjustments.  Ensure that you're listening at the rate of 1200 bps.  To make this change, go to Menu #26 and ensure it's at 1200 bps (it should be that by default).  Then drop into Menu #27 and change to where you want to monitor for IRLP data (Main, Left or Right).

Once you've done that get another radio (I used my HT) and key up the frequency your monitoring on your radio.  For me, it was the frequency I was montioring on "Main".  When you key up, you should see that on SSH, it will say COS Active, and the COS LED on the IRLP board will also light up.  Once you unkey, it will say COS Inactive and the COS LED will unlight.  Key up again, and start pressing DTMF keys, and you'll see the DMTF LED light up on the IRLP board, and output on the SSH session saying which DMTF keys were pressed.

After that test, press Control-C to kill the readinput command.  You can then type the next commands to see if the IRLP board can key your radio:

/home/irlp/bin/key

Check to ensure your radio is keyed up.  If that worked, then unkey:

/home/irlp/bin/unkey

Check to ensure that your radio is now unkeyed.

After that you've successfully installed IRLP and ensured that your radio and IRLP board and Pi are communicating with each other correctly.

The people at IRLP should email you a response soon letting you know officially what your node info is.

I haven't got any further than this.  Once I get to play with it more, I'll upload any "gotchas" to my blog.