Saturday, April 30, 2016

Wireless headless Raspberry Pi Zero with APC220 radios

As a bit of a weekend project and as a way to (finally) use the really cool APC220 Radio Communication modules that I bought ages ago I've put together a wireless and "headless" setup for my Raspberry Pi Zero. This allows me to have a remote-controllable Pi Zero placed anywhere within 1 km (line of sight) without wires! I'm hoping to use this as a robot backpack initially, probably for the Jumping Sumo.

I won't go into technical detail as the build was simply connecting the power and TX/RX from the Pi UART to the APC220 module (I've used protoboard to make a "hat") and telling the Pi to use ttyAMA0 for the console in /boot/cmdline.txt.

If you have any specific how-to questions, let me know in the comments. In the meantime enjoy the photos :)

The top of the hat
The bottom of the hat and Pi header
At the local end I am using an USB-TTL adapter and Putty to connect to the Pi.