Getting the Fun Cube Dongle Pro Plus to work on a Raspberry Pi

I wanted to be able to read the RSSI and plot the result using munin, mostly for creating a strip-chart type graph for calibrating my radio telescope. I found 3 applications that should work with the FCD pro plus and Raspberry Pi  V2:

  • Hamlib
  • fcdctl
  • carpcom-fcd

Hardware

When failing to get some of the software options below going, I did try using a better 5v usb PSU, and a shorter, thicker PSU cable. I noted that the rpi did not like to boot up with the FCD installed, and plugging it in caused the red rpi power light to momentarily dim ( without resetting the rpi )

hamlib

I installed hamlib using aptitude.

jennyb@raspberrypi ~/carpcomm $ sudo rigctl -m 2513 -r /dev/FCDPP -v
rig_open: error = IO error

( I tried a number of things but eventually gave up )

fcdctl

I built fcdctl  using :

gcc fcd.c hid-libusb.c main.c `pkg-config –libs –cflags libusb-1.0` -D FCDPP -o fcdctl -Wall -lrt -lpthread

This is the output :

jennyb@raspberrypi ~/fcdcontrol-proplus-srv $ sudo ./fcdctl -s
[sudo] password for jennyb:
FCD present in application mode.
FCD firmware version: 20.03.
FCD frequency: 43.750500 MHz.
FCD LNA gain: enabled.

carpcom-fcd

sudo carpsd-fcd –device 0 –set_freq_hz 43750500
[sudo] password for jennyb:
Frequency [Hz]: 43750500

 

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