Hi there
I ordered my ZBITX back in November 2024 when it was launched. Fantastic little thing with a interesting potential.?
Combining HF with known platform ( Rspberry PI ).
Of course, I got my unit as one of the first with high hopes and exiting. So here my findings:
* The battery on the side is somewhat interesting move. The battery holder on mine was faulty but I also removed it and are using a regular 9VDC power source. Looks better this way and I do not need to remove the batteries from the holder to recharge them.
* Find it odd that there is no proper "shutdown" of the RPI. In my UNIX-book you should not remove power from a UNIX-system. It will potentially break the system.??
* Having a separate CPU to handle the display from the main system seems to be a compromise as the main RPI cannot handle both from a capacity point of view. That is probably good, but introduces the need separate for FW-updates to both systems. Somewhat cumbersome when needed.?
* The networkinterfacing using WLAN seems not to be very robust. I find very often (nearly all times) that the interfacing with my DHCP-server does not pick up a IP-address not DNS lookup-information. Meaning that a name resolution cannot be done and the unit is not able to talk to the outside world . Having said that, this is the first node in my LAN that is having this behavior. I have between 20 - 30 nodes that do work flawlessly.
* The lack of robust TCP/IP-communication with the outside world has led to that I have not being able to do tries to update the system for many weeks. At one point I hade to rebuild my SD-card from a image given to me.?
* I find very often that the main RPI is overutilized with a lot of lag introduced when using the radio. So that makes the cumbersome user interface even more unuserfriendly. A more powerful RPI would have been handy to have.?
* The user interface is far from user friendly. Having to point there and there on the screen to change basically everything is very cumbersome and slow process. The good thing is that there is only one knob to turn. I do not say that the radios of today should have a load of HW-knobs and buttons. The design we have with the zbitx is a bit to minimalistic to my liking.?
?
Sorry for this somewhat negative feedback. But I though that I needed to share this feedback to the group.?
Some issues could be solved in SW. Many cannot be solved due to HW limitations Im afraid.?
--
Tilman D. Thulesius
SM0JZT / Sweden
Tilman, SM0JZT