I’ve been messing with Pi-Star lately and I’m impressed. Not so much with DMR and the other modes but just with the Pi-Star package in general.
The Micro SD card is read only. You have to do rpi-rw to write cli commands. This is great protection for the card! I sure this makes it tolerate power glitches and failures much better.
The way the web interface reads the config files is nice. You can both edit config files at the cli and the web gui. If you add a section, or [stanza] in ASL terms, with the cli it also shows up in the gui.
Installation is super easy. The hardest part is figuring out the initial DHCP IP. After that you just point your browser to it.
The Web gui has both a simple configuration and a ‘expert’ configuration. Most people will never need the expert mode.
It would be so cool to have a Open Source version of app_rpt with the features of Pi-Star. Who agrees with me?
I recently slapped together a hat/pi combo, and it works just fine
easy to setup and easy to work with
I use a Yaesu FT-70 with it to cross to Brandmeister and directly to FCS/YSF
rooms
I dislike the sound of digital modes, so many mushy unhearable words
but that is more of a user problem as many users sound just fine, if a mouth full of oatmeal is just fine
I agree that ASL needs a better setup/install interface (must keep SSH!)
having a control and setup interface in one is a bit busy
and they should be kept separate.
I wish my brain could grok the things a bit better
I have been 99.9% Linux user for over 20 years and I still consider myself
a noob
I mentioned in the first post that the hardest part is figuring out the IP address. But I forgot that if Pi-Star can’t connect to a LAN or WLAN at boot up it creates a network of it’s own called pistar-setup. You connect you computer to that setup WLAN, and point your browser to pi-star.local. Brilliant!
You coders out there who love AllStar should take a look at Pi-Star and incorporate some of it’s features… but don’t close source it!
I recently bought a hotspot running pi-star. Solid. DMR/D-Star are annoying- and lack of AllStar was a big bummer for me. An open source AllStar platform with similar design would be great. One thing I would add would be a personal/favorites nodes list of some sort. I actually started putting nodes in the footer of my Allmon page to have easy access to EL and AllStar nodes I want to keep handy.
when you burn a pi-star image you just need to put a wpa_compliant.conf file in the boot section of the image on the sd card so that it will connect to your wifi network.
Then you either find the ip by looking into the router dhcp lease or you can also use the name pi-star in the browser or pi-start.local and it will connect to the pi-star without having to know the IP.
You can then change the IP from dhcp to a fixed one.
The web site pi-star web site have a nice tool to build the wpa_supplicant.conf file:
shoes your country 2 letter code enter your wifi ssid and then the password for your wifi ,clic send and you will download the file already configured you just nee to put it at the right place.
I mentioned in the first post that the hardest part is figuring out the IP address. But I forgot that if Pi-Star can’t connect to a LAN or WLAN at boot up it creates a network of it’s own called pistar-setup. You connect you computer to that setup WLAN, and point your browser to pi-star.local. Brilliant!
You coders out there who love AllStar should take a look at Pi-Star and incorporate some of it’s features… but don’t close source it!
I’ve not tried it but I would expect the issue to be the web server more so than Allmon itself. Apache or the web server of your choice would need to run on something other than port 80. Install your choice of web servers, change the port to 8080 or something PiStar is not using, put the allmon files in the server’s webroot and you should be good to set up allmon.
But honestly, I’d say just get another Pi and dedicate it to AllStar.
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