Acampo/Portsdown Software



Acampo Transmitter Software

The software that runs the Acampo Version of the Portsdown Tranmitter is based on older Debian Jesse software. This software is basically taken from an existing "KNOWN STABLE" version of the Portsdown Software. Our team has taken the SD Card and simply copied the contents through existing Linux Tools to create and SD Card image that can be written to a new SD Card using the WinDiskImage32 program that is run from most Windows based OS's.
This website is only applicable to the Acampo Transmitter version of the Portsdown Transmitter.

The Acampo Team has also made the decision to disable the Acampo Software from being updated to new releases. This was done for many reasons.
First off, the current code written for Debian Stretch has repeatable instabilities that cause the Acampo Transmitter to fail in service. We believe there are Kernel issues with the Video/Audio Capture device that is causing the issues at hand. Secondly if everyone is running the same software then troubleshooting problems does become an easier task. Third our mode of operation does not require all the latest bells and whistles the newer releases provide for.

We feel that those who wish to experiment with newer releases have the option of downloading the latest sotware from the Portsdown Website onto a new card without loosing the existing "working software". This will allow for future use when the current sotware issues have been resolved.

While it has been suggested that we could simply overwrite the RPIDATV files to newer versions could be a way of upgrading the software without the risk of blowing the card does have its drawbacks. It is possible that the newer RPIDATV files may have been complied and rely on updated libraries than what you may currently have on your system. This could render your software sluggish or inoperative. So I would NOT recommend doing something like that.

Lets talk about SD Cards. Rasberry Pi recommends on its website to use a class 6 card. We have found that there are differences in the different class labels and speed ratings. A C10 card is 10Mb/s this is really slow, we find the UHS Rating of v50 or higher is the best card to use.
Another caviat about SD Cards in the Acampo/Portsdown Transmitter, the card has two partitions the first is a fat32 partition also known and labled as boot. The second is unlabeled and is a linux ext4 based file system. If you were to take an Acampo/Portsdown SD card and try to read it from Windows all you would see it the 41Mb boot partition.
Windows cannot see an ext4 file system. If you were to try to reformat the SD card then the only partition you would format is the boot partition.
There are ways from Windows to fully wipe an sd card and start over, but our team uses tools with in a linux environment to get reliable repeatable results
Our team does have tested code and a downlable image that you can write to a new card, that code can be downloaded from the link below.


Click on the following link to download the RPi 3 Acampo Software, this is a rather large .zip file (393Mb) and will take some time to download
Acampo Software Download

Once you download this file, you can then unzip it, and write it to the SD Card with WinDiskImage32. Once you boot this image, you will need to run raspi-config and expand the file system size under Advanced Options. If you do not do this step you will get errors when you boot. At this point you now have a working bootable card!