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WHISKEY FOR NOT REAL RADIO:THE BLOG |
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WHISKEY FOR NOT REAL RADIO:THE BLOG |
It's Saturday night, and I've been drinking. This should be a fun and not at all incoherent update.
I've been dicking around with BPQ32 on a Windows machine for a week or two. I don't remember how long I've been at it. It's a blur of evenings and weekends, just trying a new thing every so often, making progress here and there. Tonight was the latest and greatest breakthrough. I should explain what the fuck my goal is first. I aim to run a packet BBS on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W (the same one the Gopher Hole runs on) through a NucleoTNC. The BBS part should be obvious by now. I want to do old school communications on new hardware. I'm using BPQ32 because it is the gold standard for packet BBS ops in the modern world.
But maybe the NucleoTNC needs some explanation. I built one maybe two years ago now, and I have struggled to find a really good use for it. After all, direwolf kind of corners the market on TNC work, even earning a reputation for being better than hardware. Well, that's probably true, but a hardware TNC like the NucleoTNC means I don't have to run an audio subsystem at all, let alone a software TNC like direwolf on the tiny, constrained RPiZ2W. This is a pretty big win for me as I try to keep system memory usage under 100MB.
Okay, but why the fuck am I using Windows to test this? Because look, GNU/Linux introduces complexities I often can't account for when I'm working with software I'm entirely stupid about. I know that makes me a bad nerd, but I truly cannot bear learning a new kind of communication system while enduring the unknown unknowns that inevitably creep into anything involving GNU/Linux. So I spent a few days (or weeks, who knows really) just learning how to write a proper bpq32.cfg file. That was more work than it needed to be. I eventually got it, and managed to communicate over telnet with my BPQ server. KISS TNC was another matter.
I spent far too long trying various things trying to get my TNC to PTT until I realized 80% of the information on the Internet was wrong. The NucleoTNC runs at 38400bps for KISS, not 9600bps. That single change in the configuration made all the difference. I'm now ready to configure a second computer to talk to the Windows BPQ server to test a basic session. From there, I'm going to install linBPQ on a GNU/Linux laptop until I know what I'm doing. Then, I'll install it on the RPiZ2W and hopefully have a working BBS on the air.
"If" is doing all the heavy lifting here, so I'm not getting my hopes up just yet. I have learned a lot in a short period of time, so that's a win either way. More to come!
Until next time, be kind or get rekt