WU2O piHPSDR Controller Unit
Updated 25 January 2017 (Originally published September 2016)

Why Build A Controller: The Vision



Background

John Melton's (GO0RX) recent work on piHPSDR, his presentation at the 2016 Friedrichshafen ham radio conference, and Apache Labs announcement of a piHPSDR Controller Unit, was sufficiently intriguing to motivate me to make my own piHPSDR controller unit.

There is obviously tremendous interest in this sort of thing. Indeed, one might even say there is a bit of "Maestro envy" in the openHPSDR community. The Flex Maestro being, of course, a "knobified", stand-alone, thin client controller for the Flex series of client-server architecture software defined radios (SDRs). However, before anyone gets too excited, there are a few things to remember:

That said, current CPU usage on the Pi 3 is only in the 25% range. Clearly there is plenty of poop left to implement PureSignal and more, and the Pi 3 remains a surprisingly capable platform for SDR use, particularly with the efficiency with which John's code runs.


Design Notes

In developing my design I wanted something clean, compact, simple to build, inexpensive, and requiring no printed circuit card development. Obviously the design needed to include the four rotary encoder controls, as that is the signature design element. However, I intentionally did not include the eight hardware switches, as I did not find that the soft keys on the touchscreen display take up too much room. In fact, it seemed that the soft keys on the touch display were more ergonomically pleasing. However, now that I've got some operating time under my belt with this controller, I do often wish for a PTT button. Nevertheless, I am holding off on installing one until such time as VOX becomes a feature of the software. I suspect that will be sufficient. Besides, leaving out the eight buttons saves a ton of fussy measuring, drilling, wiring and whatnot. Just try to get those eight buttons aligned in a perfectly straight row without some milling equipment--good luck!

Speaking of luck, I found that the dimensions of the Smarticase Pi/touchscreen enclosure and a Hammond sloped instrument enclosure matched exactly. It was like they were made for each other.

In terms of encoder selection, there are a great many to choose from. I wanted them to be panel mounted, not printed circuit board mounted. Cost was definitely a consideration, otherwise I would have selected all optical encoders, as nothing feels like a really well made optical encoder. However, only the tuning wheel got an optical encoder, the remaining encoders are the very inexpensive Bournes units.

Knob selection was very important. Cheap knobs that don't fit would ruin the entire aesthetic. The aluminum knobs specified are a bit pricey, but they really make the design shine!

To simplify wiring, I chose from one of the many so-called Raspberry Pi "cobbler" kits. These kits provide a nice little printed circuit board and connector that make connecting to the Pi GPIO connector very easy.

In terms of power supply requirements, the Pi, display, USB audio interfaces (see below) and whatnot draw only a total of 1.1A going full blast while running piHPSDR. So the 2.5A wall wart Raspberry Pi power supplies would seem to be OK with a good cable. I suspect that most people experiencing problems are using USB cables with 28AWG conductors in them. If you see a yellow lightning bolt on the top right portion of your display, it means the Pi has detected an under-voltage condition. Do a little research, and buy carefully. There are many cables out there with 20AWG conductors in them and those will work much better. I chose to go the overkill route since it is not very expensive. Therefore a 10A supply from Adafruit with a barrel to microUSB adapter was specified.

For storage, a 32GB SD card was a no-brainer as storage is cheap, so no point in under-specifying that.

Finally, the design choices associated with obtaining local audio output from the Pi were surprisingly complex. Initially I tried the tip-ring-ring-sleeve (TRRS) audio/video connector output from the Pi. Unfortunately, it turns out that the audio quality from this interface, even when properly connected to an external amplifier, is quite poor, with a bad noise floor. Apparently this is a known issue with this Pi interface. Although some Pi's are OK in this respect, mine, like most, was not. Therefore I chose to use an inexpensive USB audio interface. I wanted good volume and spent some time researching various small amplifier boards and speakers. To that end I chose a particular, 5V powered, small amplifier board that got good reviews on eBay. I chose the speakers more for looks than anything else! I wanted the speakers to be on the top surface for best fidelity and volume and I did not want to engineer speaker grills. So I chose a small speaker from Dayton Audio that "looked good". As it happens, they also sound darn good as well!


Material Requirements

The design that I implemented depends very strongly on the availability of a particular Raspberry Pi 7" touchscreen housing from Smarticase. Of all of the components on the bill of materials, that is the only one that I would be worried about in terms of its continued availability. The rest of the parts are "meat and potatoes" items from stable suppliers.

*AR=as required

Construction Details

Drilling the Top Panel

Download and print the drilling template. Print at 100%. Cut out the template and tape it to the top surface of the Hammond enclosure. If printed at 100% it should match the top inlay surface of the enclosure. Mark the reference points with a scratch awl or other pointed tool. Drill holes sized in accordance with the drilling template. The plastic on the Hammond enclosure is very soft. I had best results by drilling at very low speeds and by drilling the holes in steps, starting with a 1/16" pilot hole and moving up through some intermediate size drills before drilling at the required final diameter. How accurately these holes are made makes the difference between a good looking product and a not so good looking product. For the speaker openings I used a large step drill bit.

Undercut the Mounting Boss

The rear left mounting boss on the top panel will interfere with the fastener in the corner that attaches the Smarticase hinge. Use a Dremel or similar tool to carefully machine away the mounting boss plastic such that a nut and washer can be placed in that area.

Attach the Smarticase Hinges to the Top Panel

Not much to say here. Screws, washers, nuts. Just make sure the hinges are oriented so that the hinge fasteners insert from the left and right so that they are easy to access. Test fit the Smarticase after the hinges are mounted, just to see if any adjustments are in order. I managed to find these really nice, black oxide coated, socket flathead screws at the local hardware store. They are sexy!

Hand Fit the Speakers Into the Top Panel

This can be very fussy work to make it look good, depending on how you decide to do it. In my case I did not want to engineer or fabricate a set of speaker grills. Therefore I chose to front mount the speakers into the enclosure. To accomplish this required some delicate hand filing of the enclosure and fitting of the speakers. In retrospect it might have been easier to fabricate those speaker grills, and I have since obtained some metal grill material that I may use in another version. Nevertheless, the speakers do fit quite nicely next to the display hinges, and are reasonably well protected in those spots. You will need to find some 2mm fasteners and hardware to fit through the speaker mounting holes. I actually found some at my friendly local hardware store, however I may order some black oxide coated hardware off of the internet just to make it look a bit sexier.

After fitting the speakers, remove them and lay them aside as you will not want to install them until you have soldered the leads to them. Also, by assembling the speakers last they are less likely to be damaged.





Assemble the Touchscreen and Pi Into the Smarticase

For now don't use the supplied screws to secure the Pi, just let the door secure the Pi and, optionally, add those screws when all is done. The reason for this is that otherwise the Pi can't be lifted out to insert the SD card. And don't use the jumper wires to power the touchscreen. Instead plan to use the microUSB Y-cable that comes with the Smarticase kit to power the Pi and the touchscreen.



Solder the Cobbler Board to the Cobbler Connector

Temporarily assemble the Pi, GPIO cable, cobbler connector panel and cobbler board. Check the mechanical orientation and fit of everything. Power up the Pi and, with a meter, check that 5V, 3.3V and ground are in showing up on the labeled places on the board. This will help avoid the very annoying mistake of soldering on the board in the wrong orientation. Once you are 100% happy with the orientation of the board, solder all of the pins to the connector.

I am so embarrassed I took that photo before cleaning the flux off!

Fabricate the Cobbler Kit Connector Panel

The Hammond enclosure comes with these nice little removable panels on the back. I mounted the cobbler kit connector into the left side panel, aligned with where the GPIO connector is on the Pi when it's mounted in the Smarticase enclosure. This is probably the most difficult part. I wanted mine to be as good as I could get it, so, after drilling a length of 1/4" holes to make the beginnings of a rectangular hole, I spent a lot of time hand filing that hole to be rectangular. Most people will probably just go to town with a Dremel. Your choice! Once the hole is made, lay the exterior surface of the panel down on a flat surface, drop the cobbler kit connector into the panel hole with the key oriented down towards the bottom edge of the panel and glue it together with some RTV. Do not get RTV in the keying area or on the pins. Let it dry overnight. You will be tempted to fuss with it that day, but that will just result in the assembly being damaged.

 

Assemble the Encoders into the Enclosure

Align them as you prefer for doing the wiring. You can follow my example shown below if you desire. The mounting nuts do not require a lot of force. These are small devices made out of inexpensive pot metal, so go easy on them. Indeed, the Bournes encoders are, dare I say it, cheap, and easily damaged. Again, go easy.

Assemble the Knobs onto the Encoders

You will need a 1/16" Allen wrench. On the small knobs, align one of the set screws with the flat on the shaft, tighten, loosen just a little, and let the knob fall until the set screw is resting on the D section floor. This will ensure that all knobs are the same height and have enough clearance to the enclosure surface. On the large knob just let the knob fall all the way to the bottom of the shaft. Make certain the knobs are not sitting so low they drag on the enclosure or, on the Bournes encoders, hit the enclosure when pressing down to activate the momentary switch action. Tighten all of the set screws, of course.

Wire the Encoders to the Cobbler Board

Refer to the manufacturer's data sheets, available from Mouser, for the pinouts of the encoders. I simply daisy chained a single ground wire all the way over to the cobbler connector. Both ground pins on the encoders need to be wired. If you accidentally reverse the A and B lines it's no big deal, you can reprogram that in the piHPSDR software. Only the Avago optical encoder needs a 5V connection.

The photo below shows the unit wiring before I added the speakers, which is handy for clarity's sake. The wires are routed around the edge of the assembly so that the center area is left open for the audio components.

Be very careful with the soldering iron. If it touches the Hammond case the case will melt instantly. Similarly, if you use shrink tubing and a heat gun, go easy with the heat on the case. If you are very paranoid, you could actually assemble the encoders into something temporary so that they have the same orientation, like a scrap piece of plastic or cardboard, wire them, then transfer the entire assembly back into the case. In fact, if I build another one, that is exactly what I am going to do.

Wiring is as shown in the table below.

Note 1: ground wires were daisy chained from encoder pin to encoder pin and terminated
on GPIO connector pin #39 (GND). Other GPIO ground pins include 6, 9, 14, 20, 25, 30 and 34.

Assemble the Audio Components

Make a small notch in the case as shown to allow passage of the left-handed, right-angle USB extender cable. The left-hand nature of the connector is important so that it has a fair lead out from the USB connector on the side of the Pi. If you make the notch just a little small, it will hold the cable securely and not allow it to be pulled out of the enclosure. Test fit the display as required to ensure you have enough cable to reach the USB connector and for the display to be able to be angled over its full range. (Note the screw on the back as a future ground connection point--so far I have not needed to ground the unit, though).



With the USB extender cable arranged as shown, secure it and the Sabrent USB audio interface with some 3M double-sided, high bond tape (or equivalent).

Solder speaker, power and input wires to the audio amplifier board. Again, it is recommended to do this outside the enclosure on the bench as the Hammond enclosure is quite heat sensitive. Also solder the 1/8" mini stereo phone plug to the inputs wires: tip is left, ring is right and shield is ground.

You can pull the cobbler board assembly out and away from the enclosure to solder the 5V and ground wires from the audio amplifier to it.

Plug the stereo phone plug into the green jack on the Sabrent USB audio interface. Secure the audio amplifier board into the enclosure with some 3M double-sided, high bond tape (or equivalent).

Finally, solder the speaker wires to the speakers before mounting them to avoid soldering iron heat damage to the enclosure, then assemble the speakers into the enclosure. When soldering the speaker wires pay attention to achieving the same polarity on both speakers. This way the speakers will operate in phase with each other for best sound quality.



You might also, optionally, consider provisioning an 1/8" mini mono jack on the rear of the enclosure, connected to the microphone input on the Sabrent USB audio adapter. This way you could plug in a wired microphone to use locally. I chose to forgo that approach for now, as I prefer to use a USB headset when actually having a QSO.

Assemble the Smarticase onto the Hinges

Oh boy, now it's starting to look cool! You might consider modifying the GPIO cable to be shorter. It is possible to disassemble and reuse the IDC connector at one end. Carefully pry it off, then measure and trim the ribbon cable. Be sure to leave enough cable so that the display can hinge over its full range of motion. Then reassemble the IDC connector, with the correct orientation of course, at the new end of the cable.  A bench vice makes a handy press for IDC connector assembly. If you don't have a vice to squeeze it in I'm not sure I'd try this. IDC connectors and ribbon cable are cheap and you can always get some additional material and simply make a whole new cable later.

Don't forget to plug in the USB cable to the audio interface, too.

While not the most flattering photographic angle, nevertheless in this photo you can also see the Adafruit 10A 5V power supply and 2.1mm barrel to microUSB adapter cable. This attaches to the micro-USB Y-cable to power the touchscreen and the Pi. Ten amps is plenty for USB headsets, audio amplifiers, 802.11ac Wi-Fi dongles, and whatever else might be added in the future for, as mentioned above, the whole kit is drawing only about 1.1A as is.

Build, Install and Configure the pi Operating System

Get the Pi and touchscreen running. There are plenty of websites to hold your hand here. If you are not a Linux jockey, be prepared to hack--er, I mean learn! Google and Youtube are your friends. However, I will suggest a few hints and recommendations:

Install piHPSDR

Follow John's instructions in the installation document precisely. It can be found at https://github.com/g0orx/pihpsdr/tree/master/release/documentation.

Configure piHPSDR GPIO Settings

When piHPSDR is started, it will first be necessary to press the button to configure the GPIO settings. The three Bournes encoders will require the pull-up to be turned on, but not the Avago optical encoder. If any A and B settings need to be swapped, this is where it can be done. Be aware that the numbers shown are the GPIO signal numbers, not the connector pin numbers.

This is also where the knobs can be rearranged. If you decide you want to re-order the knobs on the front panel, just change the numbers here to get what you want.

Test the Encoders and Encoder Switches

With piHPSDR up, running and connected to a radio, twist the knobs and see what happens. As of December 2016, the AF knob will adjust the audio volume and pressing its momentary switch will lock and unlock the VFO. The AGC knob obviously adjusts the AGC level, pressing its momentary switch will change the knob to RIT. The RF knob adjusts RF drive and right now the switch doesn't seem to do anything.

If something isn't working right then things will have to be debugged! Most likely there is a wire misplaced on the cobbler board.

Assemble the Bottom onto the Hammond Enclosure

A few encoder pins may need to be bent or a few wires moved for clearance. I put the supplied stick-on feet next to the fastener holes, not over them, since I expect I will want to modify the unit in the future.

If the entire assembly feels a little unbalanced, a few small lead weights glued inside the front of the bottom part of the housing with RTV will give it a little extra heft.


The Finished Result, Local Audio, and Some Operating Tips

So there you have it, a nice piHPSDR controller with built-in, good quality, local audio capability. Having the built-in USB audio interface does not preclude the use of additional USB audio devices, although currently piHPSDR will only let you use one at a time.



In the photo above you can see a  Logitech H-800 wireless headset. This headset works quite well with the Pi by means of its 2.4GHz wireless USB dongle adapter. Although this headset is also Bluetooth capable, Bluetooth on Linux, and Raspbian in particular, is not quite ready for prime time! There is also a less expensive H-600 version. And of course you can use essentially any wired USB headset on the market. I've had very good luck, and very good signal reports, with a Microsoft Lifechat LX-3000.

Local Audio Setup

In Raspbian, click on the Start Menu (the raspberry icon in the upper left), then Preferences, then Audio Device Settings. Choose the "USB Audio Device" and make it the default. This will now allow the Pi to produce all of its sounds through the Sabrent audio adapter and the Dayton Audio speakers. Hit the "Select Controls" button, enable all controls, and then set the Playback Speaker levels to 50% to start. Play some Youtube videos or something to test your work.

 
Finally, a word about latency. As of December 2016, latency in piHPSDR is quite high. I have not measured it precisely, but it appears to be on the order of 500mS. Using a Logitech H-800 wireless headset makes this worse, as the 2.4GHz link of the headset adds another few hundred milliseconds of latency itself. Certainly this can be expected to improve as the code evolves.

Operating Tips

The number one thing that should be done before operating is to calibrate the PA gain settings in piHPSDR. Without this being done it can very difficult to obtain the desired performance from the radio using piHPSDR. Be sure to go to Menu > PA and perform this calibration. Use a dummy load, of course.

The method I recommend is to go into Tune mode and adjust Tune Drive to be the value you will most normally operate at. If that is a barefoot 100W, set drive to 100. If that is 30W to drive an amplifier, then set drive to 30. This way the calibration will be most accurate at this drive level. With the drive set to your most used, nominal value, make the adjustments in the PA Gain menu as required to obtain an RF output power level that matches the commanded drive level.


Great Stuff: Other People's Work

Rick, N9HLL, and his interpretation of the project, with his own unique encoder layout. Great work, Rick!



Doug, K3DAK, has built a version that uses 12VDC power and some other neat touches. You can see many more detailed photos on how he constructed it at his imgur page.


Mike, K0JTA, went with silver knobs, a single large speaker, and very cleverly used some printed circuit board material as a speaker grill. He's also got a power switch, power LED, and brought out the microphone input to his internal USB audio interface. You can read more about Mike's build at his web site, http://s3com.net/pihpsdr/page2.html.


If you have built a piHPSDR controller using my mechanical design, then I'd love to receive a photo from you that I could add to this web page to show off your work. As Rick did, no doubt many of you will have slightly different arrangements of the knobs, etc., and it would be great to show other ideas on control placement within the context of the basic layout.


Future Projects: 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Battery Power

The ultimate goal is to make this piHPSDR controller completely wireless and portable. This should be doable. Using a 48KHz sampling rate, I can obtain good receive performance, and transmit with an occasional garble, over an 802.11n Wi-Fi connection. Testing with iPerf3 finds my 802.11n connection capable of 6Mbytes/s, while the wired 100BASE-T connection is capable of 12Mbyte/s. Given others have been successful in achieving greater than 12Mbyte/s on a Pi using 802.11ac, I am confident I can use 802.11ac Wi-Fi to run the controller. To that end I have a D-Link DWA-171 802.11ac USB Wi-Fi adapter on order. This adapter requires the installation of driver software to work, it will not work with Raspbian out of the box.

I also have a 15000mA USB battery pack capable of sourcing 2A and am waiting for delivery of some 20AWG USB cables to test this battery pack with. If this is successful then my piHPSDR controller will have achieved total portability. More to follow!