Entry Level SDR Educational Tools For Raspberry Pi

This repository contains entry level educational tools for introducing SDR technology on the Raspberry Pi platform. A Raspberry Pi 3 Model B running Raspbian Stretch is the recommended host configuration.

Installation and Setup

The following installation steps assume an up to date installation of Raspbian Stretch is being used. In order to ensure that all the latest updates have been applied, the following commands may be used:

sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade

All the required package dependencies for building the various SDR components can be installed by running the 'install_deps.sh' script with superuser privileges. Note that it may be necessary to re-run this script if any of the package installation steps fail:

sudo ./scripts/install_deps.sh

The Raspbian Stretch distribution already contains pre-built packages for SoapySDR and LimeUtils, but these are out of date relative to the current repositories and they need to be built and installed from source instead. The 'LimeSuite' makefile target automates this process:

make LimeSuite

The main GNU Radio package from the Raspbian Stretch distribution is installed as one of the required dependencies. However, an up to date version of the gr-limesdr module needs to be compiled from source - together with the out of tree GNU Radio module from this repository which contains the dedicated Scratch Radio components:

make GnuRadio

Finally, the latest files for Scratch2 integration can be installed as follows:

make ScratchRadio

The default makefile target is 'all' which will run the builds for LimeSuite, GnuRadio and ScratchRadio in the required order. After running the build process, all the intermediate files can be removed by using the 'clean' target:

make clean

Running Scratch Radio

In order to use the Scratch radio blocks, the corresponding GNU Radio wrapper script needs to be running. This occurs automatically on loading the Scratch Radio extension. The wrapper script currently runs in a new terminal window which can be useful for development and debugging purposes.

It should now be possible to access the radio functions from Scratch by running Scratch2 from the Raspbian programming menu and selecting the 'Add an Extension option under 'More Blocks'.

Removing Scratch Radio

The Scratch Radio extension can be removed by using the 'uninstall' makefile target as follows:

make uninstall

This will remove the extension files from the Scratch2 installation directory but leaves the GNU Radio and LimeSuite installations intact.

Online Documentation

For further information about programming using Scratch Radio, please refer to the Scratch Radio Wiki.