As promised above, I have been working on a Portsdown "add-on" for the Langstone, and have now issued the first release.
This release is the "Portsdown A27" version, so called because the A27 is the main road between Portsdown Hill and Langstone (and Hayling - but that's another story).
I must stress that this is a very early release and there will be glitches. Please report your problems here and I will attempt to cure them. The graphics and text are not up to the standard of the previous Portsdown releases, as I have had to rewrite them all from scratch.
You MUST remember these guidelines:
- Start with building Colin's latest Langstone release. Make sure it is at least his release from 19 May - anything earlier will not work.
- Once you are happy that Langstone works properly, follow the installation instructions for Portsdown A27 here: https://github.com/BritishAmateurTelevi ... tsdown-a27
- This build of Portsdown on the RPi 4 will ONLY work with the official Raspberry Pi screen. I do not plan to support any other displays.
- The default audio device will be the Langstone's USB audio dongle. Use the dongle described on the Wiki; this is the only one supported.
- You must use an RPi 4 - the RPi 3 is not good enough. LimeSDR is NOT supported in this build.
The only capabilities that work are:
- The LongMynd Receiver. Plug in a MiniTiouner, use the VLC player and you will find that it plays very nearly all transmissions that you can find on QO-100 and terrestrial DATV (except the QO-100 beacon). There is a new player, MPlayer, that provides a few seconds of video from the beacon, but it crashes after that because it is not really good enough.
- I have tried to ensure that all the LongMynd capabilities are supported, but it is not possible to simultaneously display signal parameters and picture, and the large size beacon MER display is not yet functional.
- On Menu 2, there are 3 players that will show video input from an EasyCap, a Pi Camera or a C920. No audio.
- The "check for update" functionality works
- There is a facility to tell the Portsdown about a non-standard Pluto IP (which is required to be known to ensure smooth switching between Portsdown and Langstone), and to update the Langstone from the "Langstone Config" menu on Menu 3.
- By default the unit starts up as a Langstone. If you exit from Langstone, it will start up the Portsdown, you can then shutdown from Menu 2, or go back to Langstone. You can change the boot behaviour (to start up as a Portsdown) from Menu 3, System Config.
This is just a start - now that I have a stable platform I can start working on all the other features. Thanks to Colin for all his help.
Dave, G8GKQ
