At Christmas I treated myself to a new machine, a BBC Master 128. It’s that new that it was manufactured somewhere between 1986 and 1993 – if you are into retro-computing you know what this is like.
Anyhow, this machine is in very good condition. It’s been refurbished with new capacitors in the power supply (something you must check on the BBC’s as they can go bang if you aren’t careful).
BBC Master 128 with GoTek drive to the left & another project sitting on top of it so ignore that 😉
It also came with a GoTek USB floppy emulator. This is a device that connects to the BBC (and others like the Amiga) as if they were a real floppy drive but instead of a disk it uses a standard USB stick which can contain images of the original disks. So many you could probably have a copy of every bit of software for the BBC micro ever produced on floppy on one stick!
Now this is perfectly fine if you have your software collection on it & rarely add anything but if you are doing any development and need to regularly add or update disks it’s a pain as you have to unplug the USB stick, put it in to your main development box, mount it, copy a 200K file (thats the capacity of a standard BBC DFS 40 track disk!), unmount it then plug it back into the drive.
You can tell it’s tedious and if regularly done could cause additional wear & tear to the contacts!
So to make this far easier I took a Raspberry PI Zero W and used it as the flash drive. In the above picture you can see a white USB cable in the GoTek, thats got the Zero on the other end of it.
If I needed to add or update a disk I can simply use SCP to copy the file to the pi and the GoTek then sees the new disk, I select it & the BBC can read it. From upload to opening it on the BBC can literally be a few seconds.
This is a good article so I’m not going to repeat it here except you don’t need to do all of them & there’s a few errors in that article which I will repeat here:
Step 4 is not needed if you used a minimal Raspbian image – i.e. no need to use the full desktop one, use the lite image as the base.
For step 6 use the GoTek as the power source not the TV as used in the article & yes for now it is being powered solely by the drive it’s being used on.
You can ignore Step 9 as we won’t be using multimedia – you could use a bbc disk image here instead
Step 10 has the errors. Here it mentions gmassstorage this is wrong & I think it’s the formatting on the site that’s broken it. Replace all references to that with g_mass_storage not the _’s, some CMS’s use _ to say underline which you can see on that page.
Steps 11 & 12 are optional – I did them but don’t use them
That’s effectively it, except a comment about powering the PI (which is in step 6 of that article).
Now I am using the GoTek to power the Pi – so there’s just a single USB cable from the GoTek to the usb port on the PI (not the PWR IN). This is fine as my GoTek has it’s own power supply.
However if you were to use an external supply for the PI, then you must cut the red wire inside the micro USB cable else you’ll feed additional power from the PI to the GoTek as well as the PI suddenly having two 5V supplies feeding it – which will cause damage to both devices!
One of the tasks I want to use a Raspberry PI for is to take over the duties of an existing ITX based linux box running my weather station. Now in theory that should be pretty simple as the current setup uses pywws to connect to the station and as that’s written in python it should work.
Now the Raspberry PI has no onboard Real time clock – which means it needs to use an NTP server to get the time when it starts. Usually you would use the default settings and allow the PI to connect to thenet for it’s time. Now this is fine if you have a working net connection but what if you are not connected to the net? You might be in the field running the PI on batteries.
As the other projects I have lined up for it is to connect my Meade LX200GPS telescope to the local network or to work with my (in prototype) radio telescopes so having an accurate clock is going to be required.
Now the obvious solution here is to use GPS as a time source. GPS works by having a constellation of satellites in orbit and each one carries a highly accurate atomic clock & broadcast both their current position and the time. A GPS receiver then receives these signals and, as long as it has enough satellites and workout where you are by comparing the times from those clocks.
So this article shows how to use A GPS receiver with the Rasperry PI – although these instructions are not specific to the PI.
The hardware
For this experiment I’m using a USB GPS receiver from Maplin – product code A73KF. I bought this several months ago when they had it on special offer for £19.99 – it usually retails for £29.99.
Raspberry PI with the A73KF GPS receiver plugged in
Now it comes with a CD for Windows machines but we don’t need it – as the majority of GPS receivers I know of use serial & this is no exception. When plugged in it appears as a serial port.
Plug it in and run lsusb
pi@raspberrypi:~$ sudo lsusb
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0424:ec00 Standard Microsystems Corp.
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 067b:2303 Prolific Technology, Inc. PL2303 Serial Port
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 0424:9512 Standard Microsystems Corp.
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
There the Prolific Technology entry is the GPS appearing as a serial port. If you look in /var/log/syslog you will also notice it will have created the port as /dev/ttyUSB0 as it’s the first serial port.
Using the PI as a GPS Receiver
Now the next step is to get the pi receiving data from the satellites. Now there is a suite of tools available for Linux called gpsd which we’ll install:
Ignore any messages from the console or in the log files, you may see it complaining about IPv6 but you can ignore that.
Viewing whats in the sky & your location
Now GPS doesn’t work indoors – as it needs a clear view of the sky so for this I’ve placed the PI on the window sill. Next I ssh into the pi and run cgps.
pi@raspberrypi:~$ cgps -s
The -s flag is there to tell the command not to write raw data to the screen as well as the processed data.
You should then get the following output:
┌───────────────────────────────────────────┐┌─────────────────────────────────┐
│ Time: 2012-06-18T15:05:10.0Z ││PRN: Elev: Azim: SNR: Used: │
│ Latitude: 51.231848 N ││ 14 43 249 40 Y │
│ Longitude: 0.514014 E ││ 25 75 283 37 Y │
│ Altitude: 132.3 m ││ 2 26 085 31 Y │
│ Speed: 0.0 kph ││ 12 56 070 18 Y │
│ Heading: 0.0 deg (true) ││ 9 19 133 22 Y │
│ Climb: 0.0 m/min ││ 27 09 133 17 Y │
│ Status: 3D FIX (1 secs) ││ 4 17 045 31 Y │
│ GPS Type: ││ 32 05 321 20 Y │
│ Longitude Err: +/- 8 m ││ 29 41 192 18 Y │
│ Latitude Err: +/- 9 m ││ 31 28 304 42 Y │
│ Altitude Err: +/- 27 m ││ │
│ Course Err: n/a ││ │
│ Speed Err: +/- 68 kph ││ │
│ ││ │
│ ││ │
│ ││ │
│ ││ │
│ ││ │
└───────────────────────────────────────────┘└─────────────────────────────────┘
Here you can see it’s receiving from 10 satellites and it has the time and your location. The 3D FIX section tells you it has enough data for a 3D fix on your location (i.e. altitude). The Err lines tell you the error in your position. If you leave it running you should see the Err values change every second or so.
Viewing GPS under X-Windows
Now above I showed how the GPS looks from an SSH connection but you can get a graphical display as well using the xgps client thats also been installed. Now if you have a monitor connected to the pi simply open a terminal and run xgps. However as I’ve not got a monitor against the window I’ve used ssh to connect to it from another machine. To get this to work you need to add -Y to the ssh command.
You should now get a window like the following open on your local machine – don’t worry if it takes a little while, it might take a second or two:
xgps running on a PI but being displayed on Mac OS-X
Setting the computer time using GPS
Now we have a working GPS we can now get the PI to use it for setting the time. To do this we need to configure ntp to use the GPS satellites as a time source. Now you should already have ntp installed but if not then you need to install it:
pi@raspberrypi:~$ sudo apt-get install ntp
Next you need to edit the file: /etc/ntp.conf and add a few lines to it defining the GPS. This can be either before or after the existing lines beginning with server:
Now if you query the server you should after a while see it synchronize:
pi@raspberrypi:~$ ntpq -p
remote refid st t when poll reach delay offset jitter
==============================================================================
*ns1.luns.net.uk 33.117.170.50 2 u 54 64 7 65.454 2.666 5.800
+resntp-b-vip.lo 127.151.91.34 3 u 45 64 17 55.704 -5.169 8.482
+bart.nexellent. 194.242.34.149 2 u 17 64 17 76.585 -4.271 57.595
+v01.s01.be.it2g 193.190.230.65 2 u 20 64 37 86.464 -2.374 228.460
xSHM(0) .NMEA. 0 l 11 16 377 0.000 144.714 3.026
SHM(1) .PPS. 0 l - 16 0 0.000 0.000 0.000
A couple of notes:
You might find that ntp doesn’t connect to the gps at first. It appears that it starts gpsd up without the link to the serial port. What I find I have to do is:
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