How to Run Winkeyer on a Raspberry Pi computer

The next thing to do is to start the winkeydaemon automatically on boot of the Raspberry Pi. There are several ways of doing this, but not being much of a Linux expert, this was the easiest for me. What I did was to create a desktop file and placed it in /home/pi/.config/autostart Now the .config folder has a period in front of it, which makes it a hidden file. So in File Manager you will have to click on View then Show Hidden to see it. If the autostart folder isn’t there just go ahead and create it.

Place the contents below into the text editor and save it in /home/pi/.config/autostart with the filename winkeydaemon.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Name=winkeydaemon
Comment=winkeydaemon
GenericName=winkeydaemon
Exec=/home/pi/winkeydaemon -d /dev/ttyUSB1
Type=Application
Encoding=UTF-8
Terminal=false
Keywords=Winkey

Reboot your Raspberry pi and open up a Terminal window. To check if winkeydaemon is running type the following: ps -aux | grep winkey if it is running, you should see something like this:

pi@MyRadio:~ $ ps -aux | grep winkey
pi 895 0.4 0.8 17144 8508 ? S 16:33 0:02 /usr/bin/perl -w /home/pi/winkeydaemon -d /dev/ttyUSB1

pi 5003 0.0 0.0 7348 532 pts/0 S+ 16:41 0:00 grep –color=auto winkey
pi@MyRadio:~ $

If winkeydaemon is running, you will see something similar to the bold text above. The numbers will be different, but what you are looking for is /usr/bin/perl -w /home/pi/winkeydaemon If you have that, then winkeydaemon is runnig. You are now ready to make some CW contacts with your logging program. There are several out there, such as CQRLog and Xlog. My personal preference is Xlog because I like to do POTA activations and Xlog allows me to easily add the two additional fields needed for POTA in the ADIF file. SIG_INFO and MY_SIG_INFO.

Finally I would like to thank Nate Bargmann, N0NB for taking the cwdaemon and adapting to the winkeyer, as well as maintaining the github page for winkeyer. I would also like to thank Jason, KM4ACK for creating such a great installation script for the Raspberry Pi for off grid / field operations.

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