Draws Raspberry PI Hat

With patience (over 6 months) my Draws Hat has finally arrived from NW Digital Radio. I also ordered a GPS mouse.

DRAWS is a platform with multiple components.

First, it is a Raspberry Pi HAT.  This is a purely hardware solution that puts several components that are useful for amateur radio projects on a single board; namely a high-performance sound chip (CODEC), a GPS with pulse per second (PPS) that includes an embedded battery backed real-time clock (RTC), and a 12VDC power circuit to power the onboard devices and the Raspberry Pi from a single power supply.  It has two mini DIN-6 audio sockets that match the ‘TNC’ specification found on many radios designed for amateur radio, an SMA connector for a powered GPS LNA antenna, power connection socket, and a small GPIO array for additional I/O.

Secondly, the DRAWS Workstation, which is the HAT plus an SD Card, Raspberry Pi, and an optional metal case, which creates a self-contained unit.  The Raspberry Pi provides the computing power for the workstation to run the drivers for the HAT components and applications to provide various functions.  Those functions are mostly in the realm of packet radio (Direwolf modem, AX.25, APRS, etc.), other digital modes (fldigi, WSJT-X, etc.), and digital voice (D-STAR, etc.), and ancillary utilities and applications such as a Stratum 1 timeserver, GPS location, and so forth.

Is there a prebuilt image for DRAWS?

Get the current beta at http://images.nwdigitalradio.com/downloads (current_beta.zip) and follow Getting Started

Starting with delivery of the DRAWS HAT, a downloadable image will be available to run the DRAWS workstation.  It will contain the current version of Raspbian (Stretch) including preloaded DRAWS HAT driver and a selection of applications that have been compiled for and tested on the DRAWS platform.

© http://nwdigitalradio.com/draws/

At the moment I use the Draws Hat for Aprs, because I am still busy trying out the possibilities of the Draws Hat. For this I use Direwolf and Yaac.

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