While plowing through a stack of old QSTs the other day, I ran across the article, “A Simple Morse Memory Keyer,” by Dave Benson, K1SWL. K1SWL’s design uses a Raspberry Pi Pico, which is a small, inexpensive, yet quite powerful, microcontroller board. Since I had one that I purchased to play around with a while ago, I thought I’d give this project a go.
The software was devloped in BASIC, using the MMBASIC interpreter, but I thought I’d use this project to learn more about Python. You can program the Pico with MicroPython, if you have the right tools. One of those tools is Thonny, an integrated development environment (IDE). There are versions that run on Windows, Macs, and Linux boxes.
I have an old laptop that I installed Lubuntu on a while back, so I thought I’d use that for programming. Unfortunately, I couldn’t seem to install the latest version of Thonny on it. I’m not sure exactly why, but I thought that perhaps something was weird with my Lubuntu installation.
So, I decided to install another ham radio distro. The first one I tried was Andy’s Ham Radio Linux, created by Andy, KB1OIQ. It had gotten a nice write-up on Hack-a-Day, and it looked like just what I needed.
Unfortunately, I never got it to install properly. The first couple of attempts were my fault. My first mistake, I think, was trying to use the Lubuntu Startup Disk Creator. I probably should have gone with one of the tools that KB1OIQ recommends, or the program that I eventually used—Balena Etcher. Plus, I really disliked the Lubuntu default wallpaper!
My next mistake was not reading the Getting Started document. In that document, KB1OIQ details the steps to follow to successfully install his distro. I just plugged the USB stick into the laptop and winged it. Using this approach, I ended up making several mistakes.
Even following the instructions, though, I was never able to install the software correctly. After four attempts, I just gave up and went to Plan B: Dragon OS.
Dragon OS is based on Lubuntu (ironically) and includes a bunch of SDR software. You can see the complete list on the DragonOS Sourceforge page. It supports a wide range of inexpensive SDR hardware, including RTL-SDR, HackRF One, LimeSDR, BladeRF, and many others.
Installing this distro was a breeze. I downloaded the .iso file, burned the installation disk with Balena Etcher, plugged it in, and it installed the very first time. Thonny wasn’t part of the distro, but I opened a terminal window, typed in “pip install thonny”, and in a couple of minutes, I had the latest and great version of the IDE. It took me two days, but I can finally start working on the keyer software now.
So, now, I have some questions for you:
- Are you using Linux in your ham station?
- If so, what distribution?
- What do you like or dislike about it?
- What are some fun Linux software packages, other than Thonny, that I can play with?
