Raspberry Pi 2 and FUNcube Dongle Pro Plus

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

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5 Responses to Raspberry Pi 2 and FUNcube Dongle Pro Plus

  1. Mike says:

    Great news Howard. How about a version of funcube demodulator for the pi. Save running my pc 24/7

    • admin says:

      Hello Mike

      Coincidentally in our weekly FUNcube meeting last week, one of the team was already looking into that!

      Many thanks, Howard

  2. Bruce says:

    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

    • admin says:

      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

  3. n8xyn says:

    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 🙂