Getting WavelogGate to run on the Raspberry Pi

Recently, I wanted to use my IC9700 a little more, so I established a VHF FT8 station using a Raspberry Pi 5.

As I'm using Wavelog now as my daily logging software, I'm using WaveLogGate as a connector to send my FT8 QSOs to Wavelog.

The WaveLogGate Repository on Github provides a *.deb package for ARM, which I installed and happily clicked on to start it.

Unfortunately, that did not start. Actually, it did nothing.

In this article, I'll describe how to get WaveLogGate running. Please, do not install the *.deb, we will run it from the source code which works nicely.

Being a linux friendly guy as I am, I headed over to the terminal to start WaveLogGate from there to see, if there are any error messages. And indeed, there were:

error while loading shared libraries: libdl.so.2: ELF load command address/offset not page-aligned

After a bit of research, I found a quick fix for that:

Open the boot config file by running sudo nano /boot/firmware/config.txt and add the following file at any point in the file:
kernel=kernel8.img
Afterwards, safe that file and reboot your pi.

I tried running the app again. No luck:

wavelog-gate-by-dj7nt: error while Ioading shared tibraries: libasound.so.2: can not open shared object file: No such file or directory

Which was a strange one for two reasons:
1) libasound (Alsa sound) was installed
2) I could not imagine what WaveLogGate would need a sound library for

After that, I contacted WaveLogGates lead developer who told me that the electron apps (the framework which the app is programmed in) ship with a whole browser which depends on the sound library. Got it. So we have to fix that. So what is electrons problem and how do we fix it? After a good hour of trial and error I got it: we need the 32 bit variant, which 64 bit raspbian for the Raspberry Pi 5 does not ship with.

No problem though, we can install that no problem:
sudo apt-get install libasound2:armhf

After this install, all error messages disappeared. Great!

But, unfortunately, the app did not start, at least, not with a GUI.

Finally, I came to the conclusion that I would just try to run the app from source, which works fine.

To also run your WaveLogGate from source, do the following:

Open your terminal, navigate to a folder of your choice. I just chose my home directory.

For all following commands, please substitute "pi" for whatever username you use on your raspberry pi.

Step 1: Update your pi

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y
sudo apt-get install build-essential git curl -y

Step 2: Install Node.js

#install node.js
curl -fsSL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_lts.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt-get install nodejs -y

Step 3: Clone the project from Github and enter the folder

git clone https://github.com/wavelog/WaveLogGate
cd WaveLogGate

Step 4: Install the app and start it for the first time

npm install
npm run start

After all these commands, WaveLogGate should start up!

Afterwards, close WaveLogGate. Next, we'll have to build ourselves a little script to start WaveLogGate without remembering all those commands. I placed my script on my desktop, but you can choose your own location if you want.

Step 1: Open the file:

cd /home/pi/Desktop
nano start_waveloggate.sh

Step 2: Paste this code in the editor and save the file

cd /home/pi/WaveLogGate
npm run start

Step 3: Make the script executable

cd /home/pi/Desktop
chmod a+x start_waveloggate.sh

After all that, you can double-click on that script on your desktop. You will get the following popup where you can just click the leftmost button, which is called "Execute" in English.

If you do that, WaveLogGate will just start up:

Finished! You can use WaveLogGate as usual!

If you need to update your WaveLogGate to a new version, just run these commands:

cd /home/pi/WaveLogGate
git pull origin master --rebase
npm install
npm run start

Wait for your new WaveLogGate version to install and start for the first time. Afterwards, close it and just keep using your start script on your Desktop!

I hope I could help you getting WaveLogGate on Raspberry Pi up and running.

Have fun in the hobby!

73 de Stefan, DB4SCW