I haven't been active on Allstarlink or Echolink for awhile, so my Clearnode hotspot has been turned off for a few months. I just finished updating my Pi-Star hotspots, which are both connecting to Brandmeister right now as I was having some problems with TGIF that I just pushed to the back-burner. I remembered, clearnode review , that the Clearnode also supported digital modes like DMR, P25, YSF, and NXDN and was curious to see if I really could connect to a DMR talkgroup from my analog Baofeng and if it worked, make the solidly built Clearnode my primary home hotspot.
I turned on the Clearnode and paraphrasing a computer tech columnist/Science Fiction author from long ago (RIP Jerry Pournelle): "I do this stuff because it's interesting to me and so that you don't have to". Actually, I'm documenting what I did for myself so that I can refer to these notes later on and so that you can, hopefully, get some use out of following what I did, or in some cases by NOT doing what I did.
Clearnode where are you?
Initially, I didn't see the Clearnode hotspot on my network. I turned the Clearnode off and then on again but still didn't see any connection. At that point, I noticed there was an option in the Clearnode mobile app to "Strobe Wi-Fi credentials" and I figured I would give it a shot as the device had been powered off for months. I entered the WIFI ssid and password and then pressed "start adding credentials". The phone flashlight turned on and began flashing along with instructions which said to point the light at the Clearnode hotspot, which in this case, was actually in another room. I did as instructed and after a minute maybe a little less I saw a message "Finished and transferred 59 bytes" . I rebooted the Clearnode and could now see by the mobile app that it had rebooted with a connection to the home network and by extension, the internet. Cool - the wifi by light actually did work - slick use of technology :-)
Node-Ventures web site is your friend.
If you have followed me so far but have not visited the Node Ventures site then maybe stop reading and go take a look now: node-ventures.com. I am not going to replay here, the excellent instructions that Gerry Filby (W6WNG) has written up on installing, updating and using the Clearnode. I could now see the Clearnode hotspot on my network and the next step is updating via the mobile app.
The online instructions say go to versions and then to RedNode. As soon as I clicked on RedNode, a prompt came up to update. However, each time I said yes, the error message "download file corrupted" popped up. Node-ventures already knew about the issue, which was due to an SSL certificate problem.
The fix was to go to versions, and choose to update asterisk first, instead of RedNode. The asterisk update took a minute or two). Then I redid the previous step: clicked on RedNode, which immediately prompted me to update and this time it took about 3 minutes to succesfully complete.
Finally, I elected to reboot the hotspot just to make sure the node came back up cleanly.
I checked the mobile app version and updated that to the latest version as well.
Does it work?
I went to http://status.allstarlink.org/nodeinfo.cgi?node=xxxx (use your OWN node instead of xxxx) and entered my node which came back
showing my node details which meant that that I was now seen by the network.
I then tried out some of the local commands just to make sure the Clearnode was working.
Time to get the DMR connection working.