To be most precise, the problem is possibly power load issues on the USB ports. The Pi is a low-power device and cannot support significant power draw out of the USB ports. Try putting your USB fobs on a powered USB hub and see if the problem goes away.
I can’t find threads when I’m looking for them (of course) but I don’t believe it’s directly related to power, at least not in this case. It’s something to do with a weird way the rPi4 addresses USB devices. Supposedly, this was corrected in rev 1.5 boards, but in my testing, it doesn’t seem to be the case. I have even used bus-powered hubs to get around this problem. Yes, I would absolutely recommend using a powered hub.
Hi N8EI and KE4DYI,
I tried moving from black to blue USB ports, same issue.
I tried a USB hub (unpowered), same issue.
There are no usb power warnings in the kernel output (dmesg). Generally you will see notices about this sort of thing, or, you’ll see USB devices disappear and reappear. Or bus power warnings. I see nothing during PTT. I’m not saying this absolves the USB but it doesn’t place blame with them either.
I’ll have to look around for a powered hub and give that a try, but without any indication of power issues, I find it unlikely to be a solution.
I did notice that in extensions.conf, there are references to ${NODE}. This variable is of course set to the first node I set up (617080). The second node (617081) is absent in this file. I’ve only used the automated setup script (asl-menu) to add the second node. Do I need to tweak or add anything here for the second node? I feel like I did modify this with my older ASL install (from a few days ago) without effect but I figure it’s worth asking.
Can I send y’all my configs? As attachments, termbin posts, or inline? What do you prefer?
Thanks,
–E
de W6EL
Where the WiKi talks about extensions.conf, that is outdated. ASL3 needs no changes to extensions.conf for normal node operation. Try putting that back and see what happens.
If you want to zip up your rpt.conf and simpleusb.conf, remove passwords and post them, we could take a look.
Unfortunately, it will not allow me to upload anything that isn’t a picture/pdf/mp3 format.
Here are the files on termbin:
simpleusb.conf: https://termbin.com/5p6b
usbradio.conf: https://termbin.com/yc1o
rpt.conf: https://termbin.com/1czk
On this clean ASL3 install, I did not alter extensions.conf. The 41751 node is mentioned in rpt.conf so that it can make a local connection on the LAN.
When the problem initially happened, I tried switching one node over to usbradio and keeping the other on simpleusb, on the off chance that there was some kind of collision happening. This didn’t solve anything, but I got the usbradio.conf so nicely dialed in that I have decided to stay with it :-).
Thanks for any advice you have,
–E
de W6EL
Well, I gave up and got another Pi 4B.
With one Pi per node everything is working. The nodes can transmit at the same time without any audio dropping.
I strongly suspect there is a bug within app_rpt, but I just don’t know enough about how that code works to make any meaningful diagnostics of it. I am fairly certain that the behavior I witnessed cannot be said to be configuration based, as I don’t think there are any known configurations that exhibit this particular issue.
Note that I did try upgrading asterisks (apt upgrade), did not notice any difference with this issue.
Honestly I can’t complain, with the “investment” of another Pi, everything is working quite well. I’ll give the two-nodes-one-Pi thing a shot with the next significant release. ASL 3 is a mighty effort with really amazing results. Keep it up!
Thanks all for your time,
–E
de W6EL
Yes, GitHub doesn’t like “.conf” files. My solution is to add a “.txt” extension to the file before uploading (e.g. “rpt.conf.txt”). I suspect you can do something similar with ".zip"s.
This is what this forum allows for uploading (see the screenshot of the “attach file” dialog).
–E
de W6EL
We run a discourse forum for wfview. If you log in and go to:
Admin → Settings → Files → authorized extensions
then you can add .conf and .txt to the list. Pretty harmless addition.
Attached is a PDF “test” file. To create this “.pdf” I started off with two files (1.conf, 2.conf), created a zip archive of the two files, and then renamed the “.zip” to have a “.pdf” extension. In reality, this is NOT a “.pdf” file. When we (or anyone) downloads the file we would just change the name back to “.zip”.
test.zip-renamed-to.pdf (382 Bytes)
Yeah, it’s better to not name files with deceptive or incorrect extensions. The forum engine can easily be adjusted (per the earlier post) to allow config files directly without even needing to zip them.
–E
de W6EL
I agree. I was just offering a way to share content until the web site(s) can be updated.