Step 4: Setting up the DVB-S2 Receiver - 28/29 August 2014
Well, it took a week to arrive from Italy, but my PCTV 461e DVB-S2 receiver was finally delivered this week, and on Thursday I finally found some time to set it up.
In principle it should have been quite straightforward. All I needed to do was to connect the receiver to one of the Raspberry Pi’s USB ports, plug in the power supply, and reboot the Pi, so that the software installed by the Outernet package would recognise the receiver.
I did all that, and then connected to the TV Headend (as I explained above) and then tried to connect the Headend software to the receiver through the settings menu. But… nothing! The software didn’t see the receiver.
I disconnected everything, reconnected it, rebooted the Pi… still nothing.
Fortunately @branko was able to help by telling me the command to run on the Pi to see what was happening as the software tried to set up the USB port:
$ dmesg | tail
[ 1264.730419] usb 1-1.3: Product: PCTV 461
[ 1264.740483] usb 1-1.3: Manufacturer: PCTV
[ 1264.750671] usb 1-1.3: SerialNumber: 0011421164
[ 1264.767132] em28xx: New device PCTV PCTV 461 @ 480 Mbps (2013:0258, interface 0, class 0)
[ 1264.793846] em28xx: DVB interface 0 found: isoc
[ 1264.804196] em28xx: chip ID is em28178
[ 1264.976707] em28178 #0: em28xx_init_dev: em28xx_write_reg failed! retval [-5]
[ 1264.992262] em28xx: probe of 1-1.3:1.0 failed with error -5
[ 1265.004141] usb 1-1.3: USB disconnect, device number 61
[ 1265.176710] usb 1-1-port2: over-current change
That message, plus a bit of help on the Outernet project’s Github page, led us to conclude that the Pi’s USB ports were not able to deliver enough current to the receiver, and so it was not working properly. (Note that I have a Raspberry Pi B+ which has 4 USB ports rather than 2, and possibly this may have been the cause of the problem.)
So, off to the internet to order a powered USB hub!

This arrived on Friday. I connected it up, plugging the hub into the Pi and the receiver into the hub. I rebooted the Pi and was pleased to see that the Pi now recognised the receiver, and the receiver showed up in the TV Headend software. Another problem solved!
I still don’t have the satellite dish connected to the receiver, so no data is arriving yet, but I am almost there.
I had hoped to set up the dish on Friday too, but I was too busy and ran out of time. Next week I’m travelling on business, so the final step to getting my ORx up and running is going to have to wait for another week, unfortunately.
Watch this space!