The new build of Pi-Star is out, no apparent issues found during beta testing. This should mark a distinct change in the release schedule, with the binaries, dashboard and OS being updated automatically, there are now less reasons to have to update the image on your Raspberry Pi. The download size has suffered slightly, now tipping the scales at just over 500MB but, I can live with that.

Version 3.3.0 brings a whole new update process to the party. With this new release, the release cycle will finally get much longer, so I should be able to get back to one release every few weeks / months, rather than 5 releases a week. The new version bosts self updating of the OS, Dashboard, Radio software and Hosts files used by ircDDBGateway, brining (finally) a solution you can install, and just not worrey about - it will keep it's self updated. I even added an update button to the dash just in case you really want to make sure its up to date right now. So where next from here? Right now 3.3.0 is being beta-tested, with an expected release date of Friday May 10th, after that the base image should be getting relitivly few updates (I hope) with most of the work being focussed on the dashboard.

Well who would have thought it, looking up around 1500 hostnames while starting a process causes it to be slow. Well it causes it to be slow for anyone who doesnt have a HUGE internet connection. Probably a good thing I managed to work up a solution for that, so that I can keep the option to make the whole US Trust network available to hotspots who are not connected to US Trust's ircDDB.

I normally wouldnt make too much fuss about a release, especially since they happen quite often, but this one has some really handy new featires. Starting with the basics, the startup delay for MMDVMHost has been extended to 60 secs - this is so that users of the blustack board dont have issues with the software failing to start while the modem is in "programming" mode. Next comes a much more interesting (to D-Star users) feature, as suggested by Adrian (M0GLJ). Adrian was moaning (he does this alot) about the fact that it is not possible to connect nodes that are not part of US-Trust, to repeaters that are part of US-Trust. Better than just moan about it, Adrian had managed to find a way to make this connection possible, but only if we edit the host files for ircDDBGateway and even then, only if we knew what all the US-Trust gateways are. After some searching of the internet I stumbled upon the data we needed, and cobbled together a method to pull that into ircDDBGateway - and..... it works! Not only does it just work, but its also updated every day so if there are systems added or removed, those will be updated.

This small update adds a factory reset option and a minor bump to the MMDVMHost software.