Official bladeRF forum

A GNU Radio Flow Graph (.grc) example would make testing easier once the board arrives. The site http://openhpsdr.org has some examples of .grc flow graphs that apply to the TAPR Hermes SDR/ Apache labs ANAN series SDR. Perhaps these might make a good starting point since the concept of the Blade and TAPR Hermes boards are somewhat similar.

Perhaps the first step is to build the device driver block analogous to the RTL2832 or Funcube Dongle
source to support our bladeRF as a gnuradio source. Perhaps Nuand has something like this that they
use for testing.

Indeed. I'm most excited about GNU Radio use. I've been under the hood a few times... I imagine I could write a driver, but I think the level above mine actually mentions the GNU Radio driver will be developed by nuand.

So, then the flow graph looks like this:

I kid, I kid.

Here's what I'm going to do with mine 90% of the time, particularly during the honeymoon phase.

Here is the setup I have that currently works for the bladerf in gnuradio.
However make sure to load the setup.txt file for the inital configuration of the sytem via bladerf-cli then exit that and then load the gnuradio-companion and lauch the grc. Note: you might have to chmod 757 /dev/bladerf to get the grc to load and connect to the bladeRF. I will be posting a detailed walk though soon to help others get up and running with gnuradio.

Hi wx5cw,
I am trying to make a similar flowgraph as you have posted above. I have used the osmocom block and set all the settings as you have specified, but the spectrum that I am getting is not as expected. Its very oscillating and I am not sure what the error is. Can you please give the steps of your implementation.

Thanks

Hi 2011EE10487,

Some of the following information would be helpful in diagnosing the issue you're seeing:

• Have you tried using a lower sample rate? Are you using USB 2.0 or 3.0 ports?
• Could you post a picture or short video clip of the spectrum?
• What versions of gr-osmosdr and the bladeRF software are you running? Does osmocom_fft work?

Since this thread is a little old, you might want create a new thread in the Troubleshooting forum and detail what you've tried, showing screenshots and logs.

Hi jynik,
Thanks for your fast reply.
I have tried USB 3.0 and also used lower sample rate. I have tried osmocon_fft but it is also giving the similar output. Further I don't know how to check the version of grosmosdr so if you could help me with this. And I am giving the link to the video of the fft https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5ZnEv ... sp=sharing.

Thanks

Hi,

I'll inject my completely non-technical .02 for what it's worth. Looking at the video I see something that looks suspiciously like the problems I was having with USB 3.0 and Windows 8.1 using SDR-Radio software. I ultimately solved it by installing a PCI-E USB 3.0 card that did not rely on Windows drivers as the Intel chipsets in Windows 8 seem to.

I may be way off the mark but are you having any success using a USB 2.0 port?

Scott

edit: Here's a screenshot of the problem I was having. At some points during your video it looks similar...again, for what it's worth:

No I didn't have any success with USB 2.0 either.

Before going further, it's probably a good idea to verify that you've got the latest and greatest versions of everything.

To check your versions of all things bladeRF-related, load your FPGA and then run the version command in bladeRF-cli's interactive mode: To check your gr-osmosdr version, you can run the following. Note that I have to use the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment varible because I installed my GNU Radio items in /opt. (h/t to horizon for pointing out that pkg-config info is availabe here.)
Here we see that I'm at commit cc083037, which is the lastest commit to master if we check the associated osmocom repo

I'm going to write up a wiki page or to this morning/afternoon about looking for discontinuities and roughly determining the max sample rate your setup can run at. I'll post that here when I get a chance.

Hi jynik,
Sorry for the late reply as I was on a vacation for a week. I've checked my versions of all things related to bladeRF. Here is the output of version command.

bladeRF-cli version: 0.10.2-git-9023f69
libbladeRF version: 0.12.1-git-9023f69
Firmware version: 1.6.0-git-89d57ff
FPGA version: 0.0.2

and the output of info command is

Serial #: e7130d59a56ffc2cb3c77e019a435981
VCTCXO DAC calibration: 0xa081
FPGA size: 40 KLE
FPGA loaded: yes
USB bus: 7
USB address: 2
USB speed: SuperSpeed
Backend: libusb
Instance: 0

On checking the version of osmosdr I am getting the output as
5410ee53.
Further I couldn't git clone from osmocon repo because of some error. So I cloned from https://github.com/bert/gr-osmosdr, And according to this https://github.com/bert/gr-osmosdr/commits/master my version is the newest.
Also if you have written the wiki can you share it here also.

Thanks.

Hi there,

So I see that your host software (libbladeRF and bladeRF-cli), firmware, and FPGA are all slightly older versions. I know it's a bit annoying, but I find it's easier to debug things when folks first get everything up to date first -- it helps rule out the possible number of differences in our setups, and keeps us from spinning our wheels on something that's already been fixed. Could you update those first, and then we'll go from there?

Given that you're having GNU Radio issues, I think it'd be better if you figured out the issue you're having with the osmocom repo. gr-osmosdr master tracks the latest and greatest bladeRF stuff very closely, so it's good to update that when updating the bladeRF software. The repo you are pulling from appears to have not sync'd up with the official gr-osmosdr master in about 3 months.

Could you paste a log from the following command, and we'll help you get straightened out with the gr-osmosdr repo situation?

I tried running the command git clone git://git.osmocom.org/gr-osmosdr and I'm getting the following message.
Cloning into 'gr-osmosdr'...
fatal: unable to connect to git.osmocom.org:
git.osmocom.org[0: 144.76.43.76]: errno=Connection refused
git.osmocom.org[1: 2a01:4f8:191:444b::2:5]: errno=Network is unreachable.

I guess this is because I'm behind a proxy server. So I run the following command (This I use to git clone other repositries from behind the proxy) git clone https://git.osmocom.org/gr-osmosdr. When I gave this command I got the following error.

fatal: https://git.osmocom.org/gr-osmosdr/info/refs not found: did you run git update-server-info on the server?

I haven't been in that situation, so I'm afraid I can't be of much help on that front. I see that someone posted a very similar quesion on Stack Overflow though, for what it's worth.