What is Pi-Star?
Pi-Star is a custom, pre-configured SD Card image for the Raspbperry Pi (and other ARM based single board computers). Pi-Star is the whole image, it is made up of a number of software components, but Pi-Star is the sum of its parts.
While Pi-Star contains many new ideas, new features and interesting innovations, wherever possible the Pi-Star team push those developments back up-stream to the source of the systems/software in use, in doing so we make sure that everyone is able to benefit from our innovations.
Pi-Star's core is built on the excellent Raspbian linux distribution from the Raspberry Pi Foundation, even the non-Raspberry Pi foundation hardware also run Raspbian at the core to provide a uniform user experiance no matter what hardware you happen to be running.
The other major components that make up Pi-Star include the excellent software stacks by Jonathan Naylor (G4KLX) & others - MMDVMHost / DStarRepeater and associated tools / programs. This software stack is fairly feature complete (it's not complete, until its complete....) and contains many innovations and tools that are usefull to hotspot operators and repeater keepers alike.
The dashboard(s) in Pi-Star version 1 to version 3 (yes there are actually more than one) are forked and quite modified from their origional code, sourced from works by Hans Barthen (DL5DI) and Kim Hubel (DG9VH), however from Pi-Star version 4 and onwards uses a totally new dashboard that has been built from the ground up by Andy (MW0MWZ), adding in new features while trying to keep resource usage down - although the look will initially remain very much like the origional dashboard.
Along with the discrete software stacks and dashboard, Pi-Star uses the D-Star host files maintained by Adrian (VK4TUX), the Pi-Star update server pulls in those host files hourly for re-distribution to our users.
The final part of the system are in the form of the update mechanism, scripts and general wizadry that bind the whole system together, provided by Andy (MW0MWZ), all of these features come together to make Pi-Star what it is, when combined with the excellent support group hosted on Facebook, Pi-Star has become one of the go-to images for Digital radio on single board computers.