Setting up a Remote Station – Part 4 Build Log

Updated: 20/3

This post will document the process of putting together all the elements of the remote station “on the bench” in the shack. I’ll update this as it goes, and hopefully put up some pictures as well.

Day One

The router, pi and UPS have arrived, so I’ve made a start.

• Configure the router
  • Connected my laptop to one of the LAN ports and logged in as admin
  • Changed the admin password
  • Set up the LAN Wi-Fi and address range. It needed to be changed because the default 192.168.1.0/24 would clash with one of my internal networks.
  • Enabled https management access from the WAN
  • Connected the WAN to my home Wi-Fi and checked I could log in from the WAN, enabling me to disconnect from the router’s LAN
  • Check that the router can reach the internet and install the NTP server package to be the local time server for those occasions when the WAN is either disconnected or using 4G as I want to minimise unecessary network traffic.
• Build the Pi
  • Downloaded the aarch64 Debian 11 image and copied it to the SSD
  • Connected keyboard, mouse and monitor to the Pi and booted it for the first time.
  • Connected it to the house WiFi, and used ‘nmcli’ to set a static address.
• I then configured a firewall rule on the router to allow ‘ssh’ traffic to the Pi.
• Configured the Pi
  • I use Ansible and Debops to manage the configuration of the various computers at chez M5KVK, so I ran the bootstrap playbook to:
    • update the system software
    • create some users on the Pi,
    • set up their “.ssh/authorized_keys”
    • give them “sudo” privilege
    • install a bunch of packages
  • After this, I could log in remotely to the Pi as ‘pi’
• Install Docker, ‘os-agent’ and Home Assistant using the Supervised Installer

Day Two

• Installed the Home Assistant addons and adjusted configuration.yaml to use Mosquito Broker, MariaDb and InfluxDb.
• Installed the Node-Red addon
• Installed system_sensors as a service
  • I noted that this had been created on the assumption that the operating system was Raspbian. Debian does not have the hooks to monitor the power supply, so that sensor is dead.
  • I also need to run the service as ‘root’ rather than ‘pi’

Day Three

• The Tapo plugs have arrived, so I installed the Tapo Controller integration. For this I needed to install HACS.
• I setup the Tapo plugs using the Tapo iOS app, connected them to the router’s WiFi, made a note of their IP addresses and added the two plugs to the Home Assistant Tapo Controller integration.

Day Four

I added the APC UPS integration to get better feedback and form the basis for the automation that shuts the radio down if the mains power fails. After reading some of the Flex documentation I realised that I needed to sequence the power to the radio. Basically, I need three “switches”

1. To control the mains to the power supply.
2. To control the 12V supply from the power supply to the Flex
3. To remotely control the Flex power itself.

So, I’ve ordered a Shelly 2.5PM WiFi Relay Switch with two relays that can be controlled by Home Assistant. One will control another 12V 30A relay in the 12V feed from the power supply. The other will be connected to the Flex’s remote control port. The sequence will be:

• Initial state, all switches OFF
• On user command:
  • Switch on mains power and wait 2s
  • Switch on 12V and wait 2s
  • Switch on Flex
• On user command or UPS going to battery
  • Switch off Flex and wait 30s for it to shutdown safely
  • Switch off 12v and wait 2s
  • Switch off mains power.