Migration To Debian 12

[Opubose]

I am interested in migrating the CubeSatSim image to support a more current Raspbian image, which uses Debian 12. The biggest issues I see are the usages of:

• The deprecated WiringPi library. I believe there's a newer unofficial fork of this.
• An old fork of rpitx
• Some old system configs in /boot/config.txt, which may be incompatible(?) with the newer Debian version. Will need to test this.

Am I missing anything? I think migrating to the newer Debian release will be a worthwhile endeavor.

[alanbjohnston]

I agree this is worthwhile to do. It has been on my ToDo list for a while, but it hasn't been a priority yet. But I'm happy to help work on it.

The other thing is Python. The environment needs to be added, and the packages will all be different and need code changes for them to continue to work.

Alan

[ve3ukw]

I've tried upgrading due to issues with Cameras - couldn't make IMX219 sensors working with bullseye.
couple of issues I ran into

• busio library is hard to find - installing adafruit-blinka solves this but you need to force it as newer versions of Python insist on using environments. I haven't investigated how venv could be used with services.
• the other issue is that GPIO27 is reserved in newer versions - this conflicts with TX LED and prevents transmit.py from working. There is an empty GPIO next to GPIO27 that could be used but I have yet to try that.
• The other issue is memory - 512MB is getting very tight. I tried on a Pico 2W. The order of install becomes critical. Start with an vanilla light OS, download/build libcamera first before installing anything else (need to add -j1 at the ninja state or you'll run out of memory)
• then download install the rest.
• the other bit that is way out of date is direwolf. Current release is 1.8. upgrading this is straight forward and can be done once everything is running.

This is as far as I've got.

Marcel

[alanbjohnston]

Hi Marcel,

Thanks for posting your progress so far!

For this issue: "the other issue is that GPIO27 is reserved in newer versions - this conflicts with TX LED and prevents transmit.py from working. There is an empty GPIO next to GPIO27 that could be used but I have yet to try that." According to this https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=287928 , it might be possible to get around this: "If you really must use those two pins with RPi.GPIO then you need to change your code to use the Broadcom GPIO numbers and not the board/physical pin numbers."

I am working on a PCB that has jumpers so that PI_LED2 the blue LED can be connected to GPIO27 (pin 13 on the GPIO) or GPIO17 (pin 11 on the GPIO) which would avoid this problem in the future.

I'll keep you posted on this and perhaps we can test it out.

Alan

[ve3ukw]

re using Brodcom GPIO: haven't tried that. Not sure this is a good way forward though - someone might want to use a hat and then this change breaks detection.
I understand the issue of backwards compatibility - using a jumper (pad) is probably for the best. make GPIO17 the default but give "legacy" installs a chance to change over to the old GPIO27.
BTW: since you are reworking the PCB: any chance to increase the footprints of the SMD parts? I tried to use as many SMD parts as possible but some of the pads are mighty tiny. KiCAD has two pad sizes. Handsolder or "regular" for machine placements - a slightly larger pad would make soldering much easier.

Always game to test things - let me know when you have the design ready.

Thanks
Marcel

[alanbjohnston]

I have made some progress on this. You can try out a new branch master-b which should install and mostly work on Bookworm (Debian 12) on the Pi Zero 2.

Here are the changes: master...master-b

Here's how to try it out:

1. Using Pi Imager, under Device select Pi Zero 2W, under OS choose Raspberry Pi OS (Legacy, 32 bit) Debian Bookworm. then write the image.

2. Type these commands into your Pi Zero 2W

   sudo apt-get update
   sudo apt-get install -y git
   git clone http://github.com/alanbjohnston/CubeSatSim.git
   cd CubeSatSim
   git checkout master-b
   ./install

To get the blue Transmit LED to work, you need to jumper GPIO pin 13 to 11 (GPIO27 to GPIO17) on your PCB. You can do it on any of the boards. The Transmit LED code is now behind a try so if there are GPIO issues, it will just mean the LED won't work, it won't crash the code. There are jumpers on the Lite PCB v2.0.4 and a future version of the Main PCB will also have this wired in, perhaps with a jumper.

One strange bug is that to use the Pi Camera, you need to use sudo for all commands. Right now FoxTelem always shows Camera FAIL but the camera works in SSTV mode.

Things still to do:

• Upgrade direwolf
• Fix the update script - right now it is completely untested
• Verify C2C, FunCube mode, Cross Band Repeater modes
• Test this branch on Bullseye to see what breaks and if I can make it work on both

You can also use balenaEtcher to write this disk image to a 16 GB or larger micro SD Card: https://CubeSatSim.org/download/cubesatsim-v2.2-bookworm1.iso.zip

The username and password are the usual pi and raspberry SSH is enabled but VNC doesn't seem to work.

This is based on the recent v2.2 release, which has some nice new features including improved simulated telemetry and simulated failures. See https://github.com/alanbjohnston/CubeSatSim/releases/tag/v2.2 for the details.

Let me know if you try it out and it works or you find bugs. Please report them HERE! I won't be supporting this image or this master-b branch outside of this Discussion thread.

Alan

[ve3ukw]

Thanks Alan - I'll give this a go in the coming days.
Marcel

[alanbjohnston]

I have made some changes in the master-b branch. Here are the improvements:

• A jumper wire on the GPIO is no longer needed - works with the existing GPIO pin
• Camera test works in FSK and BPSK mode so the Camera status should be correct in FoxTelem
• Command and Control now works
• Image will also install and seems to run on Bullseye as well - it will warn you that it is designed for Bookworm, but if you type a y it will continue with the installation on Bullseye.

It turns out that the Python GPIO library isn't doing something special with GPIO pin we are using for the Transmit LED. Instead, it seems that it is imposing a system wide lockout on GPIO pins. So if an application sets up a GPIO pin, no other running applications can use that pin. This might be good for beginners to avoid mistakes, but for a complex code, this is terrible. I have multiple pieces of code that all need to use the same GPIO pins: the main code, transmit code, command and control, and push button code. To have to put all that code into a single place so that the Python GPIO library allows it isn't possible. So I am moving away from this library and instead doing system calls to the WiringPi GPIO utilities.

I will still move the Transmit LED GPIO, but I will do some gradually over a few releases as I roll out the PCB changes.

Same instructions as before:

 sudo apt-get update
 sudo apt-get install -y git
 git clone https://github.com/alanbjohnston/CubeSatSim.git
 cd CubeSatSim
 git checkout master-b
 ./install

I have uploaded a new Bookworm image: https://cubesatsim.org/download/cubesatsim-v2.2-bookworm2.iso.zip

I'm quite happy with how this is going so far. Let me know if you give it a try!

Alan

[ve3ukw]

Installed from scratch - only difficulty encountered is Pi Image customization. WLAN doesn't get set reliably.....

Need to play and test but on first listen, TX works (Telemetry and APRS) but haven't tried any of the other modes yet. Also the TX LED is working fine. (without the hw mod)

stay tuned - a more detailed update to follow

Marcel

[alanbjohnston]

That's great news!

I've had that problem with the Raspberry Pi Imager application before. My solution is that I retype the WiFi password manually each time instead of relying on the cached value. I've never had a WiFi failure when I typed it in.

Alan

[ve3ukw]

ahhh - good point. Need to try that.

[ve3ukw]

so far all is looking good. APRS, Telemetry, SSTV are all working. Still need to play with the repeater mode and C&C.
Next is expansion to 2U and then adding some additional sensors.

Thanks for this new release - good stuff!

[alanbjohnston]

I have made more changes and uploaded a new Bookworm disk image: https://cubesatsim.org/download/cubesatsim-v2.2-bookworm3.iso.zip

This image, and the master-b branch now seems to work fine with either Bullseye or Bookworm. I had to put in some conditional code to detect which OS, as the camera code has to be different and the installation has a few minor differences too. I verified that Cross Band Repeater mode and FUNcube mode work. No jumper wire is needed for the Transmit LED to work.

Eventually, I will merge this into the master branch - it has no new features besides compatibility with both Pi OS versions.

I also changed the install script so that it also works as an update script - the only difference is if the CubeSatSim code has previously been compiled. So now instead of update being a separate script that has to be kept in sync with the install script, update is now just an alias that also calls install. It seems to work fine for v2.1 and v2.2 updates. I seem to hit a python pip problem trying to update from v2.0, but this might point to a problem with my v2.0 image. I don't recommend doing an update for earlier versions. Sometimes, running the update script multiple times can fix problems that are encountered.

For fun, I tried to install it on the 32 bit Trixie Pi OS. It didn't work, of course, but the main problems seem to be that the latest rpitx and direwolf didn't compile - it probably just needs some new libraries and packages installed.

Same installation instructions as before.

1. Using Pi Imager, under Device select Pi Zero 2W, under OS choose Raspberry Pi OS (Legacy, 32 bit) Debian Bookworm. then write the image to your micro SD card.

2. Log in and type these commands into your Pi Zero 2W:

   sudo apt-get update
   sudo apt-get install -y git
   git clone https://github.com/alanbjohnston/CubeSatSim.git
   cd CubeSatSim
   git checkout master-b
   ./install
   

Alan

[alanbjohnston]

I have made more updates to the master-b branch which can be installed on either Bullseye (Debian 11) or Bookworm (Debian 12).

This code is getting pretty stable. It is using the very latest version of Direwolf. It also has a preview of a new CubeSatSim mode - PacSat! So you can try that out if you want. Instructions for this new mode are here: https://github.com/alanbjohnston/CubeSatSim/wiki/PacSat

Same installation instructions as before.

1. Using Pi Imager, under Device select Pi Zero 2W, under OS choose Raspberry Pi OS (Legacy, 32 bit) Debian Bookworm. then write the image to your micro 16GB or larger SD card.

2. Log in and type these commands into your Pi Zero 2W:

    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install -y git
    git clone https://github.com/alanbjohnston/CubeSatSim.git
    cd CubeSatSim
    git checkout master-b
    ./install
   

Feel free to post any comments or bugs on this branch here.

Alan

[ve3ukw]

oh - this is interesting. Will definitely give PacSat a go.

Thanks
Marcel