Raspberry Pi Setup Tutorial

Prerequisites

• Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ (or newer)
• MicroSD card (16GB or larger)
• RTL-SDR or HackRF One SDR

1. Prepare SD Card

Flash Raspberry Pi OS (64-bit Lite recommended) to your SD card. See official Raspberry Pi imaging guide.

Enable SSH during imaging for headless setup. Set up Wifi before imaging if possible.

64-bit Trixie (Debian 13) or newer.

On any other platform, see compile from source below.

2. Initial Setup

Boot the Pi, connect via SSH, and update the system:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade -y

3. Install OpenStint

Add the package repository and install:

echo 'deb [trusted=yes arch=arm64] https://repo.lapbeeps.com/apt/ /' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/openstint.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install openstint

That is the whole install. It pulls in the SDR libraries and Python dependencies, then enables and starts openstint.service.

It's using the RTL-SDR implementation by default, so if it's plugged it, this shows it already working:

systemctl status openstint

4. Configuration

Arguments live in /etc/openstint.conf, not in the unit file:

sudo vim /etc/openstint.conf
sudo systemctl restart openstint.service

OPENSTINT_ARGS="-g 20 -s /var/lib/openstint"

To use a HackRF instead of an RTL-SDR, switch the ExecStart line — the unit ships with the HackRF variant commented out — and set the HackRF gain flags in /etc/openstint.conf (-l/-v, not -g):

sudo systemctl edit --full openstint.service

5. zRound bridge

The bridges in /usr/share/openstint/integrations/ are all installed, but bridge-zround.service ships disabled: which bridge you want depends on your timing software. Enable the one you need:

sudo systemctl enable --now bridge-zround.service

See ZRound, RCGTiming and LapBeeps for the per-back-end notes.

6. Verify

sudo systemctl status openstint.service
sudo journalctl -u openstint.service -f

Learning mode .rc4 files

Learning-mode *.rc4 files are saved to /var/lib/openstint. This library is user-writable (no need for sudo to modify it).

Compile from source (alternative)

For development, for platforms other than 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS, or to change build flags such as SAMPLES_PER_SYMBOL.

Tools to compile (ubuntu/raspbian/etc.):

sudo apt-get install build-essential cmake pkg-config ninja-build git

Install its dependencies:

sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0-0-dev libzmq3-dev cppzmq-dev libliquid-dev libfec-dev

CMake fetches rtl-sdr and hackrf itself, each at a pinned revision, and links them statically. That is deliberate: hardware support lives inside the driver, so the version Debian ships decides which dongles work. The libraries above are used as packaged.

Install these to have the udev rules and device-specific CLI:

sudo apt-get install rtl-sdr hackrf

Then checkout this repo, and build with cmake/ninja (Release build enables -O3 compiler flag, improves performance significantly). The first build also compiles the two vendored libraries, so give it a few minutes on a Pi:

git clone https://github.com/zsellera/openstint.git
cd openstint
cmake -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -B build .
ninja -C build
./build/src/openstint_rtlsdr -g 20  # or ./build/src/openstint_hackrf -l 20 -v 20

Services, from source

Install bridge-zround dependencies:

sudo apt-get install python3 python3-zmq

The unit files in systemd/ are the build-from-source variants: they run as User=pi out of /home/pi/openstint, so name your user pi to use them unmodified. (The packaged units in packaging/ are the ones the .deb installs; they differ deliberately.)

sudo cp systemd/openstint.service /etc/systemd/system/
sudo cp systemd/bridge-zround.service /etc/systemd/system/
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable --now openstint.service
sudo systemctl enable --now bridge-zround.service

With this path, openstint arguments are edited in the unit file itself:

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/openstint.service
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl restart openstint.service

See README.md for available command-line arguments.