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 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.

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.

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?

Hi jynik,
I've solved the issue of cloning the latest git repo. But now when I'm building the osmocom block (using the wiki http://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/GrOsmoSDR) I could successfully complete the command cmake ../ but when I've given the command make, it gave the following error

/home/shubham/Documents/gr-osmosdr/lib/bladerf/bladerf_source_c.cc: In member function ‘virtual int bladerf_source_c::work(int, gr_vector_const_void_star&, gr_vector_void_star&)’:
/home/shubham/Documents/gr-osmosdr/lib/bladerf/bladerf_source_c.cc:163:65: error: ‘bladerf_sync_rx’ was not declared in this scope
make[2]: *** [lib/CMakeFiles/gnuradio-osmosdr.dir/bladerf/bladerf_source_c.cc.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [lib/CMakeFiles/gnuradio-osmosdr.dir/all] Error 2
make: *** [all] Error 2.

If you have any idea how to solve this problem then please help me out.

Thanks

Thanks for your help. I could solve that issue after getting the new version of libbladerf. But after getting the new version of all(libbladerf, bladerf-cli an osmocom), when I tried to run osmocom_fft I got the following message.
linux; GNU C++ version 4.7.2; Boost_104900; UHD_003.006.002-64-g92b0b7ab

gr-osmosdr v0.1.0-78-g1e8b45d0 (0.1.1git) gnuradio 3.7.2.1
built-in source types: file fcd rtl rtl_tcp uhd hackrf bladerf rfspace
[bladeRF source] Using nuand LLC bladeRF #0 SN e713...5981 FW v1.6.1 FPGA v0.0.2
LNA gain range: start 0 stop 6 step 3
VGA1 gain range: start 5 stop 30 step 1
VGA2 gain range: start 0 stop 30 step 3
Supported sample rates 160000-40000000 step 40000.
Using Volk machine: avx_64_mmx_orc
Set center frequency to 1000000000.0
python2: /home/shubham/bladeRF/host/libraries/libbladeRF/src/sync_worker.c:78: rx_callback: Assertion `b->status[samples_idx] == SYNC_BUFFER_IN_FLIGHT' failed.
Aborted (core dumped)
.
I tried creating my own flowgraph for spectru analyser in gnuradio and execute it but I got the same error in that too. So if you could please help in solving this out.

Hi,
I've pulled the latest from master and the error is removed now. But after all this it seems that I'm still getting the discontinuites as the output of spectrum analyser that I got is same as before.

Can you run the osmo FFT command with "--oscilloscope" at the end of it and show a movie or describe what the output looks like on the XY tab? This will give us time domain information. Looking at spectrum like that doesn't really give me a good understanding other than "Things are bad". Time domain will let me know if you are saturating (which is my guess) and by how much.

If you are saturating - lower your gains until you aren't. Things should appear much more sane at that point.

Brian