Pi Toppings

Boy, labels can really help.

As soon as I had a few Raspberry Pis, I began to realize that knowing what the MAC address was for a Pi was handy, so I put a label on each Ethernet connector with the MAC address.

In working on the Midland Hamgate with multiple TNCs, I was having some initial issues that seemed to be related to the particular Raspberry Pi.  At that point it became obvious that I needed quick access not only to the MAC address, but to the name my dnsmasq server would assign to that Pi.  So, more labels:

MAC and nodename labels

At first I had two TNCs, one for my home JNOS and one for my portable JNOS.  But the Midland Hamgate will require multiples, which means assigning an I2C address to each TNC.  Since I can't see what I2C address is programmed, and it is pretty clumsy to even read it once JNOS is running, labels for the I2C addresses seemed necessary:

I2C address labels

OK, that was pretty good, but once I started doing RF testing it became evident that it is useful to know what frequency the TNC is assigned to.  Even more important, once it is in service it will be very handy for debugging, so:

Channel Labels

So now my TNCs are all covered with stickers, but they seem to like it.  As best I can tell, they are all working:

Heard List