TNC-Pi, Raspberry Pi and AX25

Further to an ealier post about packet radio on a Raspberry Pi, I have been presuaded to give a talk to my local Amateur Radio Club on the Rasperry Pi and radio so I’m pulling my finger out and getting things sorted. If I can get it working the final demo is hoped to be using packet to pass messages to a Pi controlling an electric wheelchair that I’ve been tinkering with for far too long.

Someone pointed me in the direction of the TNC-Pi project which looked superb, so I had to go and buy one. After a relatively straightforward build, it worked first time, although it was slightly uncomfortable not being able to follow my normal ‘baby steps’ approach to testing – you had to go for broke and hook up a radio and try and start decoding packets – I couldn’t find a way to get any responses from the TNC otherwise. Is this because it runs KISS rather than traditional TNC firmware as my Tiny-2 does?

Incidentally, I did almost choke when reading through the TNC-Pi instructions and came to the bit about xastir and found I’d got a namecheck for another post!

Anyway, so far it does exactly what it says on the tin, and I had my first QSO (with myself) at the weekend between two Pis – one with the TNC-Pi the other with a Tiny-2. I also managed to get a shell login over packet which was neat (too geeky for me) but that might be running before I can walk.

I have a week left to complete my presentation – will hopefully post something here when it’s done, I’m now reading up on the finer points of AX.25, and getting stuff worked out in a nice ordely progression.

• packet radio
• raspberrypi