Short answer, the AURSINC is a knock-off/clone, it has been known to have issues, and the kitsforhams fellow will not provide assistance, since he gets no revenue from the sale.
As for RPis, the RPi Foundation says they are coming back to market, and prices and availability should become more "reasonable." (My word) Somecretailers are taking backorders and shipping RPi 4.
The Libre, I have no idea.
The Allstar software stack is written for the RPi OS ecosystem, probably hard to rewrite it for an x86-based PC, very, very different. Not impossible, but not trivial.
The AURSINC board is about connectivity, and it doesn't run pi-star, it runs other software and only supports a few modes, etc.
Good luck,
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On Feb 3, 2023, at 21:33, Carl <carl@...> wrote:
?Hello everyone,
Just about to start tinkering with AllStar, and after some reading, I hoped to hear a couple opinions from the many of you with experience.
Firstly, I would like to use anything other than an overpriced RasPi. Has anyone used the Shari with either a Libre SBC or with a UART <--> USB? Both BlueDV and MMDVMHost, for example, run fine on a standard windows or linux PC connected to a Pi hat via a $10 Aursinc interface, which cuts Pi right out of the picture. I would like very much to do this with Allstar, but setting up the antiquated Debian versions felt more like archeology than radio. I would like to run the Shari on a PC or a contemporary SBC other than Pi, and Libre looks promising. I will have one tomorrow, and will be able to experimentally configure an MMDVM on it, to test OS and GPIO compatibility and I will report results, but any preliminary thoughts or advice, especially from anyone having done this will be gratefully appreciated.?
Also, I am curious about any differences between the KitsForhams and the Aursinc Shari. The Aursinc is under $100 and can be purchased on Amazon, but it has apparently been "upgraded" from SR818 to SR-FRS. Is this an upgrade, a largely irrelevant lateral move, or a significant loss? With no current experience with Allstar, I am ill equipped to guess.?
Thanks in advance for any information that anyone might have time to share, and the very best wishes / 73 to all.?
