BATC Forum

We've been doing a bit of brainstorming and realised one way we could significantly reduce the cost of a Portsdown 4 would be to implement a web interface for user control, thereby removing the need to buy a touch screen.

The idea would be to replicate or improve on the current user interface (smart phone control sounds very interesting ) however our current development team are already fully or over committed to features on the roadmap.

Therefore we are throwing this one out to the community to see if there is anyone willing to take it on. We believe it would be a relatively straight forward task and the Pi4 has more than enough resources to handle the task.

All Portsdown 4 code is on Github and ideally the development would be done in the Github environment so the release version can be easily implemented in the released product. https://github.com/BritishAmateurTelevi ... portsdown4

Post here if you want more details.

Noel - G8GTZ

Nice to see BATC conclude to go forward with a web interface.
"We believe it would be a relatively straight forward task" : Hope you could find some good resources, but it is maybe not as trivial as it seems.
Hopefully some developments could be reused from PlutoDATV firmware (thanks to web developers contributors). 73 Evariste F5OEO

Good idea. Hopefully Everiste's next firmware will support this Portsdown interface.

Mike

Giving this a boost as there doesn't seem to be any takers yet - surely someone out there has the right skills and would welcome a challenge!

73
Noel

I would have thought the code rather similar given the pluto is running a similar OS but it might be too time consuming for our web coding experts. Web stuff isn't my skill set, I still use Notepad for developing web pages.

Another blatant boost to this post to see if there is anyone out fancies doing this over the Christmas holiday/January lockdown

Noel

The easiest web interface would be via something like VNC but that would require the RPi to use the HDMI video. I remotely control my telescope which uses a RPi. The telescope RPi runs astroberry and Ekos which allows full control of it all. It also allows local wifi connection to the RPi from a laptop etc. when no LAN is connected.
It could hold some clues on possible solutions. Just wish I could program better. Just got into the spaces needed in Python!

Martin G8LCE

Sorry for bringing up an old post, but did anything happen around this? I would be keen to get involved

Hi Tom

Yes, as described on page 29 of CQ-TV 275, the latest Portsdown 4 software now supports a web interface. Thanks to Phil M0DNY with his help in implementing this.

HOWEVER, it does not currently work without a touchscreen fitted. I know how to fix this, but it has not risen to the top of my to-do list yet.

I'll be forcing a framebuffer of the correct size without a screen, but that needs tweaks to /boot/config.txt that interact with other display selections, so will need careful design and integration testing.

73

Dave

Cool, no problem then. I'll have a look at the cq-tv issue, must have missed that \