Installing BPQ on the Raspberry Pi and TNC-Pi

Willem A. Schreüder AC0KQ

Much more detailed about BPQ are provided at G8BPQ Home Page This page shows a mostly canned procedure to do this. You can use this as a starting point and then customize it.

If you want to use BPQ as an RMS gateway to WinLink, you need to obtain authorization from the WinLink folks. See this link on how to do that.

If you have any corrections or comments about this HOWTO, please email me.

Hardware

• The Raspberry Pi is available from several sources for about $35-$40. If you want to use the TNC-Pi as a daugter board, use the Model B or B+.
• The TNC-Pi is available at Coastal Chipworks either built or as a kit. Get the kit, it is easy to build and lots of fun. The instructions are almost as good as the old Heathkit manuals.
• For most locations you need some sort of enclosure. I use the Bud Industries Pi Sandwitch which allows the Raspberry Pi and TNC Pi pair to be mounted.
• The rPi runs on 5V, so for a 12V system you need a converter to supply 5V at 1A continuously. The 7805 style regulators generate a lot of heat at that current so I use the Murata 78SRH-5/2-C instead, which will work for input voltages from 8-32V DC. I use a right angle Micro USB cable which I cut to wire for power. If the cable uses standard color codes, white and red are data which you can ignore, red and black are positive and negative.
• The rPi needs an SD card to store the software. The Model B uses a standard size SD, the Model B+ uses the Micro SD format. A high speed and reliable card is critical, so getting a 16GB Class 10 card is recommended. The bigger card should last longer since the wear is spread over a larger space. Get a spare since the cards do wear out eventually.

Software

• Download Raspbian which is Debian for the Raspberry Pi. There are several other OS versions, but this one is my choice as a pretty vanilla Linux distro. Unzip the image from the ZIP file and follow these instructions to burn the image to the SD card.
• Insert the card into the Pi and boot it. You can either
  • Connect a keyboard and monitor and log in directly.
  • Connect the pi to a network running DHCP and ssh into it. The hostname willshow up as RASPBERRY in the DHCP leases on your router.
• Log in to the computer using user name pi and password raspberry.
• Run sudo raspi-config
  • Expand Filesystem
  • Change User Password
  • Internationalisation (set time zone)
  • Advanced options (hostname)
  • Reboot

Install and configure BPQ

• In the home directory, create the BPQ sub-directory
  • mkdir BPQ
  • cd BPQ
• Download bpq-config and make it executable
  • wget http://www.prinmath.com/ham/bpq-config
  • chmod a+x getbpq
• Run getbpq to download pilinbpq, the HTML pages and mkbpq
  • ./bpq-config
• Reboot to make sure BPQ starts automatically and everything works.

Using BPQ

• You can connect to BPQ node from any computer on the LAN using
  • telnet X.X.X.X 8010
• Log in using your BPQ user name and password