How I Made My QO-100 Control Dashboard With NODE RED

foreign [Music] s video so I had a few people ask me if I was able to share my code for the dashboard control I made from my qo 100 narrow band and datv transceiver now in this video I'll talk about how this was made and how it was interfaced electronically to the equipment as mentioned in my videos I changed from originally using an Arduino with Ethernet shield over to using node-red running on a Raspberry Pi now I won't go into how to install no red on a Raspberry Pi this extremely easy is you only need to issue one install command as shown here now I'll leave a link to this page in the description below so it's nice and easy to follow so what does my qa100 dashboard do well starting on the left under the driver tab this allows me to turn on and off a 12 volt Supply to my RF driver board which in essence is how I start and stop transmitting to the satellite two gauges are shown here one which shows the voltage and the other which shows the current in milliamps now these gauges take data from a device called an ina219 the Ina 219 has a supply voltage of 5 volts which is taken from the pi now it's data connection is via i2c which is just two wires connected to the pi the SDA and scl connections the great thing about i2c is that they can be connected in parallel as long as they have different addresses you can communicate with each device independently the driver amp is connected across the shunt resistor and when power is applied to the driver amplifier the Ina 219 reports back to the pi the current consumption and voltage the Ina 219 specification says that it can measure between 0 and 26 volts and up to 3.2 amps however when using the IMA 219 with node red the node produced a negative voltage reading when going above 16 volts so in my case I only use the ima219 for the 5 volt rail 12 volt Rail and drive a power board within my setup now I think this is an issue with the Ina 219 node on node red rather than an issue with the device itself I guess I could try this on an Arduino to make sure but I've done that as yeah so how do we add the gauges on the dashboard and grab the data from the Ina 219 first you need to add the Ina 219 node from the palette manager now once added you can then drag this onto the flow just double click on the Node and you'll be presented with some options now here we need to Define which i2c address is being used once set click update you'll notice two outputs on the Ina 219 node one is the voltage and the other is the current consumption value this is not the current consumption of the Ina 219 but it's the current consumption of the device connected in line with the shunt resistor now we can drag a couple of gauges onto the flow and then join the output from the Ina 219 node to each gauge now once you deploy you can now view those gauges on the UI page which is just the same IP address and port number of your node-red installation but with forward slash UI at the end now let's talk about the two buttons on the bottom left driver on and Driver off now these buttons control a USB HID relay board the hid board I have has two relays on it one to control the power to the driver and the other to switch the lmb voltage as you can see here the HID relay board is connected to the pi via a single USB cable a USB cable also provides power to energize and switch the relays with the usb hid module connected you can now install the node to control this within palette manager we can install the no red USB HID relay node now once that's installed we can drag one onto the dashboard and my driver one is connected to relay 2. so what will happen here is this drop down list it will show you how many relays are on that hid board it does detect it automatically which is quite nice now to change the state of that relay we need to drag on a button once you've dragged on a button we can go in and have a look at the settings all we need to do is give it a name a label and then change the payload now the payload for this button will either be true or false that's because you can set it as a Boolean here obviously buttons can do lots of other different things like send a string a number even a Json or even timestamp or switch to another flow but as we just need a Boolean I.E a true or a false payload type is set to a Boolean so the driver on button has a payload of true if we now open the driver off button the payload is false you then drag a connection to the relay and that's how it works you click deploy and then on the dashboard you can use on or off so as you can see there's a few more things on this flow which I haven't spoken about just yet so let's just first talk about the Pluto here this section down here the firmware that I've got installed on the Pluto is non-standard it's a custom firmware and within this firmware it provides a mqtt broker which we can get some information out of so for example using the mqtt in node dragged over if I double click on one we can subscribe to a specific topic obviously you would need to configure the server settings as well which would be the IP address of your Pluto now obviously depending on what firmware version you've got installed may depend whether this feature is enabled or not however I have three mqtt ins because I'm going to be monitoring three different topics coming from the mqtt broker which is running on the Pluto and here we take out the fpga temperature we take the payload and we just send that to a custom gauge if you like those gauges just search for canvas Dash gauge on Google and you'll be sure to find them we also get the buffer State and the net bitrate as well which is mainly used when I'm using datv now in the middle of the flow here we've got a section where we're using an ads-1115 module now this is actually an analog to digital converter but I'm using it for two different features so the first one at the top is connected to a thermistor module that thermistor module outputs an analog signal and then that feeds into the ads ADC through some calculations in code we can work out the degrees in celsius at a thermistors reading the ads-1115 EDC is actually Four channel so I'm using another channel for the lnb voltage the reason why I'm using an ads1154 measuring voltage is because lnb voltage will go above 16 volts and if you remember what I said earlier about the Ina 219 issue above 16v adults then that wouldn't work so I'm using it here what I'm also doing is using a voltage undivider this is where you just put in the values of the resistor one and two and it works out what the voltage should be for the last node down the bottom here is a bit more complicated now this provides information to show this here where it says sat locked or PLL locked I run a Leo Bodner gpsdo which provides a 40 megahertz clock signal straight to my Pluto this keeps it bang on frequency and doesn't drift occasionally this may become unlocked and I need to see that before I start transmitting so the way that I get that information is by using a script a python script provided by Leo Bodner that python script is then triggered by this inject node here on the left with an interval of every 10 seconds it will trigger this script now what happens is when it runs this script on the pi the output from that script is captured and it's outputted here on one of these lines so using a function I'm taking the payload and just literally stripping the information that I need so character 26 and then 14 characters and then also doing the same for the PLL status at position 40 and 14 characters and then that just then outputs to a text label which is then shown on the dashboard so it's quite simple but also quite complicated you'll see need to spend some time getting this python script working because it's not straightforward there's quite a lot of prerequisites that you need to run before it will work now as mentioned before in my other videos the Leo botner GPS is connected directly to the pi so it provides a data connection and also a power connection so it's powered all the time so there we go guys this is an overview of how I put together my node-red dashboard for my qo 100 transceiver now I know this has been quite in depth and quite complicated maybe for some but hopefully it's triggered enough interest for you to go and install it and see what you can build with it until the next video stay safe thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one [Music] thank you

Channel: Tech Minds

Views: 8,740

Keywords: ham, radio, software, defined, digital, dstar, dmr, fusion, ysf, nxdn, antenna, resonant, nanoVNA, how to make, how to, tutorial, waterfall, signal, transmission, qo-100, eshail2, tech minds, node red, nodered

Id: hc_hwh4hWwk

Length: 10min 21sec (621 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 09 2023