UHD and GNURadio installation¶

The UHD driver deploy a USRP device. The development environment GNURadio is also recommended in order to provide several signal processing building blocks operating in a pseudo-real-time fashion.

This documentation explains how to install both UHD and GNURadio from the sources with the help of the PyBombs script.

Downloading and configuring PyBombs¶

PyBombs is an unified installation system for GNURadio and its "out-of-tree" modules (including hardware drivers). We first download it through Git with an unprivileged user (but with sudo permissions):

git clone https://github.com/pybombs/pybombs.git

Run first the configuration of PyBombs as unprivileged user.

cd pybombs && ./pybombs config

The output should be something like this. Notice that since we chose /usr/local as installation prefix, the configuration fails at the end of the process (it is normal).

Username for GIT access
gituser [damien]:
Install Prefix
prefix [/home/damien/target]:/usr/local
Order in which to attempt installations when available, options are: src, rpm, deb
satisfy_order [deb,src]:
Comma separated list of package names to assume are already installed
forcepkgs []:
Comma separated list of package names to always build from source
forcebuild [gnuradio,uhd,gr-air-modes,gr-osmosdr,gr-iqbal,gr-fcdproplus,uhd,rtl-sdr,osmo-sdr,hackrf,gqrx,bladerf,airspy]:
Time the monitor thread waits (in seconds) before retrying downloads
timeout [30]:
CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE args to pass to cmake projects, options are: Debug, Release, RelWithDebInfo, MinSizeRel
cmakebuildtype [RelWithDebInfo]:
Build doxygen while compiling packages? options are: ON, OFF
builddocs [OFF]:
C Compiler Executable [gcc, clang, icc, etc]
cc [gcc]:
C++ Compiler Executable [g++, clang++, icpc, etc]
cxx [g++]:
Concurrent make threads [1,2,4,8...]
makewidth [4]:
done
Settled on prefix: /usr/local

[Errno 13] Permission denied: '/usr/local/lib64'
Error! Configured install prefix requires root privileges. Please re-run as sudo

Rerun the configuration with sudo and the intruction should end gracefully.

sudo ./pybombs config

Optionally, it is possible to define a maximum number a concurrent workers (it will be used by make).

sudo ./pybombs config makewidth 2

Installing UHD and GNURadio from the sources¶

Run the installation of UHD and GNURadio with the following instruction (it might take one to several hours).

sudo ./pybombs install uhd gnuradio