I bought the Duplex MMDVM Hotspot Support C4FM/DMR/DSTAR P25 With Raspberry Pi 2B+ to cooperate with my Radioditty GD-88 DMR radio. Unfortunately I have to say that I was bit struggling to get the device working because there is almost no information regarding this device in the internet and the device came without any manual. At first I was struggling with the setup and at second with the Pi-star update on the device.
The device arrived with the Pi-Star 3.4.17 version and when I accessed the Admin or Configuration section I was reminded I am running an outdated version. I tried to use the Update available at the upper menu but It didn’t work even if the management tool confirmed that the update was finished as you can see below.
Because I have no experience with devices like this even no knowledge regarding Raspberry or Pi-Star I asked for a support in the Pis-Star Support Group on Facebook.I was recommended to flash the the Raspberry software directly on its SD card. Unfortunately there is no access to the SD card and the only way was to disassemble the device. May be it would be possible to access the SD card by removing the left panel which covers the internal battery but the I would recommend to remove all covers otherwise the internal cables connected to the baterry, USB-C charging board or the boards might be damaged.
Unfortunately the SD card is located on the bottom side of the main board at the lowest part. I removed the SD card and stored it as a backup card if the upcoming flash is not successful. I took a different micro SD card and formated it as FAT32.
I downloaded the recommended Pi-Star 4.1.5 version (file: Pi-Star_RPi_V4.1.5_30-Oct-2021.zip) from the pistar.uk page. I unzip the file and flashed the new micro SD card with the downloaded image file. I used the balenaEtcher software downloaded from here: etcher.balena.io to flash the SD card.
I checked the if the Duplex MMDVM Hotspot Support C4FM/DMR/DSTAR P25 With Raspberry Pi 2B+ works with the new micro SD card and the Pi-Star 4.1.5 SW version and assambled the device to its original stage.
The last step was to update the current Pi-Star 4.1.5 version to the Pi-Star 4.1.6. The step was easy because I only used the the Update from the upper menu and the link from the top of the page.
I hope this might help to some beginners (as I am) struggling with this Dual Hotspot even if some new version of Pi-Star will be available.
OK1TK HAM Radio 