I now have my tracker and RX iGate up and running. The iGate is currently in the loft powered by a USB power bank so obviously I need to set that up in some permanent fashion. I haven’t yet got a case and battery for the tracker so I’ve put that in a plastic box with another USB power bank. I took it for a walk at lunchtime and I was pleased to see my route on aprs.fi when I got home.
Here are some notes on how the installation went. Hopefully it might help anyone else setting this up.
Installing the iGate with Ricardo’s web installer was very straightforward. I had to install the CP2102 drivers but the installer gives you a link for those. On first boot the iGate creates a wifi hotspot. I connected to this with my phone, set up the SSID and password for my wifi access point and rebooted. Now I was able to connect from my PC and complete the configuration.
The tracker was somewhat harder! There is no web installer for this yet so I had to install platformio (I already have VSCode). When it came to importing the project you have to select the board type but the Heltec Wireless Tracker is not listed. Eventually I found the post by M0JKS earlier in this thread that explains what to do. You just select another board (I chose the Heltec Wireless Stick) and then you edit the platformio.ini file to set the default board type. Having got past this I could complete the configuration and upload the firmware. But I could not get the final step of uploading the filesystem to work. It just wouldn’t upload. Ricardo’s instructions say there is a bug in VSCode and closing and reopening it would fix it. But however many times I restarted VSCode, my PC or the board it just wouldn’t work. Then I managed to go down a massive rabbit hole of my PC no longer recognising the board at all and it wouldn’t recognise a Raspberry Pi Pico either. This was eventually fixed by uninstalling USB controllers in device manager. I still couldn’t upload the filesystem though.
Eventually I discovered that it’s necessary to put the Heltec board into boot mode for it to accept anything over the serial port. To get it into boot mode you hold the user button and then press the reset button (or you can hold the user button while inserting the USB cable). I was then able to upload the filesystem and the tracker was running.
Fairly quickly it picked up the time and then the date from a GPS satellite but it stubbornly insisted I was at lat/lon 0/0. Checking Ricardo’s GPS page suggested that the onboard GPS antenna would struggle to pick up satellites while indoors especially on first power up. So I put the tracker and a USB power bank in a plastic box and left it outside for a while. I don’t know how long it actually took to get a fix but this worked and it now had the correct position. I’d left the iGate on my desk but it hadn’t received a signal from the tracker until I brought the tracker back upstairs. I guess leaving the antenna horizontally on the desk was probably never going to work too well!
Ricardo @CA2RXU, thanks for your excellent software but I think the documentation could do with a couple of improvements. First, if your board is not in the list when you import the project, just edit the platformio.ini file. Second, to upload the filesystem you need to put the board into boot mode - this will depend on the board so perhaps the Heltec wireless tracker is the only one where you need to do this.