SOURCEFORGE » RALF

h1. UHD and GNURadio installation

The UHD(Universal Hardware Driver) driver deploy a USRP(Universal Software Radio Peripheral) 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":http://code.ettus.com/redmine/ettus/projects/uhd/wiki and "GNURadio":http://gnuradio.org from the sources with the help of the "PyBombs":http://gnuradio.org/redmine/projects/pybombs/wiki script. The following prerequisites are assumed in the following:

* a GNU/Linux operating system ;

* a user account with administror rights (through sudo) ;

* an Internet connection (if necessary, set @http_proxy@ and @https_proxy@ environment variables appropriately).

h2. 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):

<pre>

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

</pre>

Run first the configuration of PyBombs as unprivileged user.

<pre>

cd pybombs && ./pybombs config

</pre>

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).

<pre>

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

</pre>

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

<pre>

sudo ./pybombs config

</pre>

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

<pre>

sudo ./pybombs config makewidth 2

</pre>

h2. 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).

warning. If you are using a proxy, you should configure sudo in order to "preserve environment variables":http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8633461/how-to-keep-environment-variables-when-using-sudo

<pre>

sudo ./pybombs install uhd gnuradio

</pre>

The duration of the installation depends mainly of the following parameters:

* throughput of the Internet connection ;

* frequency and number of CPU cores ;

* number of prerequisite packages installed on your system.

h2. UHD configuration

h3. Update the firmware database

In order to make sure that the firmwares are up-to-date, you can run the following instruction.

<pre>

sudo "/usr/local/lib/uhd/utils/uhd_images_downloader.py"

</pre>

h3. Setting up real-time scheduling

Since the UHD needs a high priority of execution, it is recommended to add the following line to @/etc/security/limits.conf@.

<pre>

@usrp            -       rtprio          99

</pre>

Hence, it necessary to create the group @usrp@ and add to this group any user willing to use the USRP hardware.

<pre>

groupadd usrp

adduser <my-login> usrp

</pre>