[arm-allstar] Help Radio to GPIO Channel Select

[Kurt Hallmeyer]

Hi Bobby,

 

I have plans to do channel steering with a GM300 which is similar.  My
problem is also that I haven't had time to get to it except just some
preliminary experimentation.  I agree that you want to be really careful
using the I/O pins on the Pi to avoid damaging it.  I would recommend that
at the least you use a transistor or  opto isolator to buffer them from the
radio I/O  pins.  

 

I have done some experiments with channel steering using a SR-201 Network
Relay board (Google if you are curious).  This totally independent of the
Pi.  I put together some basic PERL scripts  to command the SR-201 output
states via TCP.  The scripts run on my Allstar Node (RPi 2 running Allstar
v1.5) and are associated with user commands so that they can be executed via
DTMF over the air via my simplex node.  I'm not a programmer and had never
used PERL before, but have some programming experience over the years so I
just worked with it for a while until I got it doing the basic job for me.
It is not "production" quality yet.   In my preliminary experiments it seems
to work and since it doesn't use the Pi's I/O it avoids the possibility of
damaging the Pi.  Using one of these boards also opens the possibility to
other remote control functions either from an Internet connection  or over
the air. If you do decide to go this direction, I can send you the scripts I
have so far.  But again, they are basic "proof of concept" scripts and not
fancy.   I'm sorry that I can't help integrate the scripts with Supermon (no
idea).  

 

I don't know if this helps much, but I figured I'd share my experience with
BCD channel steering via Allstar so far and see if others pop up with more
help or a more elegant solution.  Let me know if you want more information
about what I've done and we can email.  

 

73,  Kurt  KK7WK