Self-Contained s/iGate + Digi

Yesterday, I quickly put together a self-contained, self-sustaining, easily deployable i/sGate + Digipeater in-a-box.  I had all the parts I needed, so, most of the work was to designing and assembling the system and took me about a day (after bug fixes, etc).

The parts I used here include:

• A used Ammo-Can (large enough to hold 2 7Ah SLA batteries, and the below parts)
• Raspberry Pi 2,
• TNC-Pi,
• Baofeng UV-5R w/ charging cradle and battery (1800mAh)
• Solar Panel + Solar Charge Controller
• 30A fuse box w/ fuse
• a 30A rated switch (on/off)
• cigarette lighter connector
• cigarette lighter USB charger/adapter rated for 1.5A at a min
• a few Anderson Pole connectors, and tools to make the wires
• Wires/solder equipment
• liquid electric tape  – exterior rated
• Velcro tapes
• grommet
• tools of the trade
• Hot glue / gun

A couple future additions/ideas:

• air vent + fan (12v dc) for air circulation
• weather related input devices

I have a YouTube video of the first phase and can be found here:

Since the video was made, I made a few mods to the setup to make it more efficient and zero noise and the below pictures are taken during and after the mods were made

 

Version 3: Rx Only w/ DireWolf 1.2 experiment

I made a few follow up modifications to the setup.

• changed the iGate to use DireWolf software and thus removed TNC-Pi momentarily for experiment
• changed the iGate to Rx Only
• added a programmable voltage regulator at 5Amp rating
• added the new usb WIFI dongle.

The below pictures are from these changes.

(since these experiments, I have finally landed on the following project for “field-ready” setup. The project can be found here)

Thanks

73, N0AGI