Having a mobile satellite tracker I needed something small that was a all in one unit for mobile operations that could also be used at home while not mobile. I decided to go with a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8GB of ram and paired it with a 10.1″ touchscreen with built in speakers. At the time of this writing I had intended to use my CaribouLite SDR Pi hat but it currently does not work on a Pi 5. I have a few other SDR’s sitting idle so I decided that I would use either a PlutoSDR or HackRF for my full time sdr, depending if I need a Bias-T or not. This paired with a RTL-SDR dongle for the HF stuff or whatever. I have a power inverter in my car but could also use a 12v battery with a 5v buck converter to power the Pi. While not mobile I plan to use this in my kitchen for local scanning, AM, FM, looking up food recipes, or whatever.
Materials Needed
- Raspberry Pi 5 8GB – I have the Geekworm NVMe adapter with a 512gb M.2 drive
- Active cooler
- GeeekPi Raspberry Pi 5 aluminum case – https://a.co/d/guxC67N
- 10.1″ Touchscreen with built in speakers and stand – https://a.co/d/f6icvi1
Lets get started by drilling out a few holes in the bottom of the GeeekPi Raspberry Pi 5 case so we can mount it to the touchscreen.
Here you can see I drilled out new holes just a few mm over from the existing ones and installed the standoffs for the Pi.
Now mount the bottom of the GeekWorm Pi case to the touchscreen taking care on which direction the Pi’s ports would be facing.
Next came the case shell and Pi with the NVMe hat, Plugged in the HDMI cable, and plugged in the USB for power and touchscreen. This screen is nice because it can be powered and touch off one USB port on the Pi.
I used the alternate power cable for the touchscreen to power the fan as it luckily had 5v on it provided by the Pi.
I put Velcro on the back of the touchscreen to mount the SDR of choice to it.
I had to make some changes to /boot/firmware/config.txt so the proper aspect ratio and HDMI audio worked.
# If you have issues with audio, you may try uncommenting the following line
# which forces the HDMI output into HDMI mode instead of DVI (which doesn't
# support audio output)
#hdmi_drive=2
hdmi_force_hotplug=1
framebuffer_width=1024
framebuffer_height=600
hdmi_cvt=1024 600 60 3 0 0 0
#Next is for headless usage only (no HDMI connected) and 1080P resolution
hdmi_force_mode=1
hdmi_group=2
hdmi_mode=87
#hdmi_mode=82
The setup works nicely and with the on-screen keyboard doing whatever is a breeze. Using this as a mobile SDR rig is awesome. I’m going start making a mount to 3d print for my car. I think its going to be just a simple slide in mount on my dashboard. I will update this post when I finish it.
