Raspberry Pi 5 and SatNOGS compatibility?

SM0TGU · October 24, 2023, 5:06pm

Hi,
will the new Raspberry Pi 5 be compatible with SatNOGS client?
/Lars

fredy · October 29, 2023, 5:03pm

Requirements-wise it should work fine, however without one to test it is difficult to say as it may need some updates.

stefanp · February 2, 2024, 2:45pm

Hi Fredy, any news about PI5 in the meantime? /Stefan OE6ISP

fredy · February 2, 2024, 3:17pm

As far as I know, we haven’t tested yet PI 5.

stefanp · February 3, 2024, 6:21pm

I found, that the requirement for the pi5 is the bookworm os. Everything that runs on bookworm on pi4 should also run on pi5.

PE0SAT · February 3, 2024, 7:47pm

And the current SatNOGS client depends on Debian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye)

Then at the moment it won’t be possible to run a SatNOGS client on a Pi5

SA2KNG · February 6, 2024, 7:02am

If docker works on rpi5, which I suspect it does, satnogs-client will work as well. Not on the host os itself thou, yet.

PE0SAT · February 6, 2024, 4:48pm

Of course, sorry for not mentioning this solution.

deckbsd · August 14, 2024, 1:34pm

Hello,

Any link on documentation about that ? i would like to test it on a pi5

SA2KNG · August 14, 2024, 2:20pm

Yes, do note that it is not official but rather my personal guide before it is fully supported by lsf.

github.com

kng/satnogs-client-docker/blob/main/lsf/LSF-GUIDE.md

# Guide for LSF satnogs-client with docker compose

## Intro
This is aimed for those who want to try out the client in docker and thinks it's a bit too complicated.<br>
I will try to explain the basic concepts and how to get up and running.<br>
My preferred distro is Debian 11 (bullseye) and this guide will be tailored for it, but there should only be small differences to others.<br>

## Basic description of Docker
[Official overview](https://docs.docker.com/get-started/overview/)

***Images*** are usually hosted on a registry, for example hub.docker.com, from where you can pull them to your system.
They are the complete software bundled to run an application, in this case a debian image and a lot of packages installed that is required for satnogs-client.<br>
***Container*** is the running instance of an image and is basically an isolated environment where you run the app.
They are always start fresh from the image and can be modified, but it's non-persistent so after a stop any changes are lost.<br>
***Volumes*** is either a persistent storage for containers or bind-mounted to your host for configuration or storage.

***Compose*** This is the main difference from the [old guide](../GUIDE.md), where everything is controlled with the [docker-compose](docker-compose.yml).
In this file all the different services (essentially containers) are specified and all it's settings and relationships between them.
The containers exist on a separate network in this configuration, so rigctld runs in its own container and the satnogs-client talks to it over this network.
What this means is that you don't need a bunch of scripts to start/stop/update everything.

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deckbsd · August 14, 2024, 3:04pm

Nice! thanks you

deckbsd · August 14, 2024, 5:50pm

It seems to work (at least my station appears online, but i didn’t connected any sdr to it, it was just to do the installation, the hardware will come next).

If i understand correctly i have to configure everything using the station.env file right ? i can’t run satnogs-setup on the container

SA2KNG · August 14, 2024, 9:26pm

yes, this is the case. a bit of a step to use the user guide instead of a nice menu system.
although it is pretty easy to go from a satnogs-setup configured system to docker, as the /etc/default/satnogs-client already contains all you need. just need to convert the format from quoted values.

I’ve mostly been waiting for the network based setup, so did not do any work on implementing satnogs-setup for the containers.
I had some ideas on doing basic setup and constructing the compose yml and basic settings with a menu system, but naah

K2PI · August 17, 2024, 1:23am

I have several PI5’s here, but what would be the advantage to using them for Satnogs? At this point, my Pi4’s don’t seem to be overtaxed.

Thanks.

SA2KNG · August 17, 2024, 7:53am

The Pi4 is good for 2 simultaneous -client’s so, yeah (:
More of a “I only have a Pi5” thing for now I guess.

Using docker you can run it on whatever you want basically, within the supported cpu arch: armv7l, arm64, amd64. with some build work also i386, riscv64 and probably more.

I’d say the main advantage of the Pi5 is when running it on NVME drive instead of uSD, this is really a game changer for the Pi.

K2PI · August 20, 2024, 11:28pm

Thanks, I’ve more RPI’s than I would care to admit doing many different things. I have 4 RPI5’s, and frankly only two of them are doing anything that really requires that much CPU and memory. I have a Plex server on a PI5 running off an SSD, and you are right, that is a game-changer.

Cheers.