Folks,
Today we spent some time with the new Raspberry Pi 2 and the FUNcube Dongle Pro Plus.
As many will be aware, the original Raspberry Pi had a problem with its USB host stack, for which I released a workaround here: this simply reduced the dongle’s bandwidth so that the Raspberry Pi could keep up.
Well the good news is that the Raspberry Pi 2 so far does not seem to show the same limitation. I recorded an hour of full bandwidth this afternoon, and it plays back perfectly, which would not have happened with the original Raspberry Pi.
Talking of the Pi 2 in general, this is a very significant update. Compiling code natively on the original Pi was hard work, it was tediously slow. Frequently, you’d cross-compile, which although is frequently done, it’s hard to set up and the environment needs continually tweaking and updating. On the Pi 2 on the other hand, it’s like night and day, it’s a piece of cake to compile your code natively. I was really enjoying running both a native screen and keyboard/mouse combo together with a VNC X session simultaneously, it really is a joy to use.
Many thanks, Howard
Great news Howard. How about a version of funcube demodulator for the pi. Save running my pc 24/7
Hello Mike
Coincidentally in our weekly FUNcube meeting last week, one of the team was already looking into that!
Many thanks, Howard
Hi Howard,
Sorry to bother you here but I’ve sent you a couple emails regarding an issue with my original FUNcube dongle and haven’t heard back.
Has your email address changed?
Thanks.
Bruce W1SO
Hello Bruce
Apologies, I’ll see if I can find your email. The best place to go is in the “Contact Us” on the Shop page as it’s a guaranteed delivery system. I find emails regrettably all too often register false positive on the various filter systems, so the Contact page seems to be far more robust.
Many thanks, Howard
That’s great to hear! I’m hoping to be able to sometime soon dedicate a raspberry pi 2 to just this 🙂 I’ve tried running GQRX but it’s just to demanding, if the operating system was stripped to the bare minimum it might work, as of now I just get audio stuttering sounding much like a Dalek from Doctor Who 🙂