BladeRF astronomical interferometer

Working on something interesting? Share it with the community!
jynik
Posts: 455
Joined: Thu Jun 06, 2013 8:15 pm

Re: BladeRF astronomical interferometer

Post by jynik »

dlonard wrote: The FIFO approach that you suggested works well, with the caveat that the temp files for each BladeRF grow very large, so sustained recording is still not possible yet. I expanded the GnuRadio FIFO flowgraph to read the three temp files and it worked fine.
If files are growing large, I think we may have some miscommunication or have something I have to do a better job clarifying here... let's figure that out.

The idea is that bladeRF-cli is writing to and GNU Radio is reading from a Unix Named Pipe (or "FIFO") --- not an actual file on disk or in a RAM-based filesystem.

This should be created with mkfifo.

Let me know if I've clarified anything or only added more confusion.

- Jon
livingstone_ray
Posts: 1
Joined: Tue Aug 29, 2017 7:55 am

Re: BladeRF astronomical interferometer

Post by livingstone_ray »

hi there.

i have the comments and i am i have a coupling of questions regarding the clock and sample synchronization.

firstly, i am doing an OFDM SIMO wireless system and i am trying to perform clock synchronization and sample alignment at the 2 BladeRF RX boards to ease the burden of synchronization at the software level for my diversity combining. i have followed David's work on the configuration of master receiver and slave receiver, in my case which is only two boards, so what i am trying to do is first configure the master and slave with the scripts attached below, then i run my GNU Radio flow graphs which has osmocom Source blocks which set the gains and everything else, then with the GNU Flow graph running i fire the trigger using "trigger j71-4 rx fire" from the master console, the issue is i am receiving anything at all, so my question is when i configure the boards using the bladerf -cli first and then run GNU Radio flow graphs, does my osmocom Source blocks overwrite the settings i did before with bladerf -cli?, which could be the reason why i cant fire the trigger and i cant receive anything.

secondly, if i am correct regarding the above, how can i make the clock and sample settings using bladerf -cli and then just receive the samples as i normally would from the osmocom Source block of the receiver?, i am aware of the FIFO approach but i dont have enough memory to store temp files as i am running GNU Radio from a 30 Gb Ubuntu partition that i dual booting with windows 10 on my laptop. maybe Jon you could explain a little more about how the FIFO approach actually works if i am incorrect.

thanks.
Post Reply