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GNU Radio Organizational Changes to Address Growth

I've been running the GNU Radio project for over five years. In this time, we've dramatically expanded its capabilities, prominence, and performance. We have attracted great developers and a fantastic user base. And we have built the highly successful and growing annual GNU
Radio conference.

I feel that I have accomplished a great deal of what I was hoping to when I took over this role. Part of my job (and much of the fun) was being hands-on with the code almost daily. But there's a lot more to do in GNU Radio, and it is time for a new vision to move it forward to where we see it going next.

While I was thinking about this role change, the opportunity arose for me to become a DARPA program manager, which is one of the most exciting opportunities I can imagine. I will still be working on radio, communications, and, of course, software radio, and I still hope to support the project and continue working with the community we have in whatever ways that I can. But this new position gives me an opportunity to pursue engineering, science, technology, and research in areas and ways that I haven't been able to do in my current role.

I am pleased to announce our new leadership team, who are already very familiar to many of you. Ben Hilburn will be taking over as Project Lead while Johnathan Corgan will become the Chief Architect in charge of the codebase. They have already been doing a great job of building up their team structure and their vision for the next stages of this project, which is exactly what we need to grow and move the project forward.
 

The transition is already happening, and we can all consider Ben and Johnathan to have taken up their roles today. I will still be actively involved in GNU Radio over the next couple of months until I start my new position at the end of May.


You'll be hearing more details from them soon. But I hope that everyone knows how proud I am of this project and what we're doing here as well as my confidence in Ben, Johnathan, and what is coming next.

Thank you all!

FOSDEM and Hackfest Followup

We're back now from our Berlin Hackfest and FOSDEM. We had a great time and got a ton done. I tried to keep track of our work and progress at the Hackfest, so take a look at the wiki page for details on that. Basically, we all got a lot accomplished that improves the code base of GNU Radio as well as a handful of other side projects.

One important item for everyone to keep in mind is that we are once again pursuing GSoC as a mentor organization. We are working on our list of GNU Radio projects for this summer. 

And thanks again to c-base for hosting us!

We went straight from the Berlin hackfest to FOSDEM. I spoke on the hardware main track, and we had a full schedule and packed room on Sunday for the SDR Dev Room. They have the video for my talk posted already, though sadly it missed the first 15 minutes and there is a problem with how the slides were captured. We're also waiting for the videos from Sunday's dev room to get posted, hopefully with no problems.

Oh, and I have posted my slides and all of the GRC flowgraphs I created for my talk here.

Post GRCon15

GRCon15 finished up a few weeks ago, and I've just now found time to voice some of my thoughts on it. First, immediately after GRCon happened, I went to Paris for the SRIF workshop, which was great and fun and another successful workshop on software radio. I immediately flew from Paris to St. Louis for the DARPA Wait What? conference where I was a panelist along with Matt Ettus and Elad Anon. Great conference, a total blast, and I think we had a really good discussion about spectrum and wireless technology. So that's been taking up some of my time.

Now, GRCon15. I really couldn't have been more pleased with how it turned out. The speakers were fantastic. The attendees were fantastic. The venue, location, and food were all fantastic. Hell, even the weather was fantastic. And another huge thanks to our sponsors and organizers!

Really, I don't know what more to say about it. I'm sorry if you missed it this year. I think everyone (or most everyone, at least) got something out of it. It was fun and full of information about capabilities within GNU Radio and cool projects happening around GNU Radio. I hope, though also expect, that next year's will be even better.

A final couple of thoughts. A friend of mine came by just for one day to talk shop, but his reaction was interesting. He asked me, "I don't understand, why is everyone paying attention?" To which I responded, "no one comes to GRCon for tenure. They come because they are interested in it and it helps them do their jobs better." But it makes for a great environment for talks and discussions. And speaking of jobs, it also amazed me that every company that came is hiring. We can't produce enough talent in this field fast enough. Which is absolutely fantastic!

Prepping for GRCon15

We're almost done with the agenda for GRCon15; just a few more titles to fill out and some swapping around of the lineup. But looking at it, I'm excited about the amazing set of speakers and talks we've been able to put together this year. Our New Users Day will showcase program managers from both DARPA and NSF to provide their visions of science and technology with software radio and GNU Radio. After that, we have some of our top contributors talking about various in-depth technical aspects of software radio and how to use GNU Radio.

Come Tuesday, we'll start with the main conference. Leading off with our keynote, the thought-provoking "godfather" of SDR Joe Mitola will likely start us off with some interesting ideas. We've then split the talks into two general groups: Tutorials and Apps & Research. In the tutorials, we will discuss the various aspects of GNU Radio itself. The apps & research talks will involve either the way people are using GNU Radio or exploring future ideas in software radio that we're working on.

This year's, we're giving our big sponsors a chance to address the entire audience. Each day, we'll hear from one sponsors. We'll start off Tuesday with Ettus Research, Wednesday we'll have DRS, and Thursday ADI.

Friday is our free-for-all day, the Hackfest. We're compiling a list of projects and issues that we'd like to tackle at this hackfest. While everyone is welcome to select their own project or projects to work on, we want to provide some concept of what specific issues the project could really benefit from for those just getting into GNU Radio and our community. We'll have that list of ideas up soon.

GRCon is the time when all of our Working Groups get a chance to get together and discuss their future plans.  These sessions are open to all, and it's a great way to find the right people to talk to about ideas in a particular area and get involved with the project. The WG meetings this year will be parallel sessions to the main talks in the afternoons, so you can chose to attend the talks or a working group that you're involved with or has caught your attention.

And finally, RFNoC from Ettus Research is quickly becoming an important part of our work in software radio and GNU Radio. We're happy that Ettus Research is providing a tutorial at GRCon15 on Wednesday for how to use and develop RFNoC blocks. Though this is free, there are limited numbers of equipment provided, and access has already sold out.

Comments on GRCon's Growth

As the fifth GRCon, we've seen rapid growth year over year. What started with a few dozen people stuffed into a room at UPenn has grown to hundreds of people coming to talk and learn about GNU Radio. As you can seen from the speaker lineup and talks we've prepared, while we're still centered around GNU Radio, there's a lot more going on in wireless around the project that we're tapping in to here. There's so much growth and opportunities in radio technology, science, and education. We'll be hearing and talking a lot of these at GRCon15 and in the next year to come. At least.

Updates and updates and updates

This blog has been rather silent lately, but that's not because there's not enough to talk about in the GNU Radio world. In fact, there's simply been too much! We've been too busy with events, adding new features, improving old features, and adding new website info that I keep forgetting to update here.

First, you can see for yourself the things that have been going on with the GNU Radio Project at the Events page. We just had hackfest at TU Delft that went quite well followed by another successful SDR Dev Room at FOSDEM. A Couple of the videos for that event are already online.

Meanwhile, coming up, we have:

And fred harris and I are teaching another SDR class with the UCLA Extension program.

We have also announced our plans for the 3.7.7 release of GNU Radio, which will now include VOLK as a separate library.

And the GNU Radio community has been working hard on improving our websites. We are near to a release of our new CGRAN website, which now ties in nicely with PyBOMBS and will help us keep up-to-date with everything better. And we are working on a new front page for gnuradio.org. You know how you've hated being dumped into that Redmine wiki page? Well, that will still hang around as the developer's portal, but we want our main page to be more user friendly and to address the GNU Radio project as a whole, including GRCon and other events and where to find users and use cases of GNU Radio.

Along with all of this, we've been working on a number of features. I'll spend more time on each of these later, but wanted to get the word out there.

  • Support for GNU Radio applications on Android. I'm calling this an alpha release since there's still lots to do to make things work smoothly here.
  • Reviving ControlPort functionality by using the Apache Thrift project. We're close to having this merged into master, but the branch is up on my github page.
  • Providing improved packet-based and burst digital signals. Again, a work-in-progress with the branch up on my github page.
  • Adding sample rate and timing info on a per-item basis in a flowgraph. This will allow a block to ask for the exact time stamp of any item, and it provides a global understanding of the sample rate of each block. The code on my public branch works, but I have a better idea how to handle things when sample rates change during runtime.
  • Improving our QA testing and continuous integration services. I've been rolling out a Jenkins server in my office (for now) that manages a handful of different nodes for different purposes. I have a box with the minimum dependencies we require for GNU Radio to make sure we're not moving past them as well as testing on various other things like OS X and 64/32-bit installs. And I even have a system testing our embedded SDK cross-compiler with on-board testing of the QA to see what breaks there. This will help ease my mind of missing something or overlooking some problems. I'll get weekly reports but can also kick off these tests whenever we need to get a state of the project.

I think that wraps up the main points of the project that we're working on. I'll update again with details of some of these projects when they've rolled out more fully, especially on the Android, ControlPort, the website, and GRCon items.

European Hackfest hosted by TU Delft

If you follow GNU Radio at all, I'm sure you've heard about our Hackfests. This is where a lot of GNU Radio developers get together for a few days to a week at a time and hack out GNU Radio code. We've found these fantastic ways to improve the project as it gives us time to plan, discuss specific topics, hang out and get to know each other, and code code code! A large amount of the code making up GNU Radio has either come directly from or been inspired by these events.

Mostly, we've done these in the US. Ettus Research has been a fantastic host to a number of our hackfests as has Virginia Tech. Just recently, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology hosted a mini hackfest right after the WSR and a full hackfest a few months later. These were our first events held in Europe, and though I personally missed the second one, the post-WSR hackfest was great fun and hugely successful.

Following up on this, I wanted to announce and give a pre-emptive thanks to TU Delft in the Netherlands who has agreed to host a hackfest early next year! The plan is to hold the hackfest on TU Delft campus during the last week of January so that we can go straight from Delft to Brussels for FOSDEM that weekend (partly assuming that we have an SDR dev room at FOSDEM again this year). I think having these two events back-to-back is, pardon the Irish, going to be great craic. 

Want to come to the hackfest? We certainly don't want to discourage anyone, but I also want to point out that the hackfests are usually smallish affairs of 10 to 20 developers, usually people heavily involved in either writing or using GNU Radio regularly. So the facilities are on the small side to fit us, and you're on your own for housing, food, transportation, etc. But, if this is something that excites you and you can make it to Delft, please let me know if you'd like to come. Just shoot me an email. And if you don't know my email address, then you probably haven't been using GNU Radio that much :p

Release of 3.7.4

Well, I mentioned it here a few weeks ago and last week we did it. GNU Radio version 3.7.4 is now out and about. We're really happy with the release for a number of reasons. If you take a look at the release notes, you can see not only a lot of new features we've added on, but also the huge number of contributors. So not only are we feeling really good about the project itself, we have a great community of users that are doing really neat things and helping us improve our code. So a huge hand and big thanks to everyone!

I think that the release notes give you the basic idea of what's going on in this version, including ZeroMQ blocks for improved connections between networked flowgraphs over the UDP or TCP sources/sink, better QTGUI handling, and some nice improvements to the GRC interface. Also, as I mentioned in my last post, we now have our new FEC API concept included in gr-fec. Oh, and on that last note, we're very close to having some of the LDPC work done during last summer's GSoC integrated with the FEC API so we can all start to use it in our flowgraphs!

The good work is never done, though. We still have so much we can and want to do in this project, and so we've already started laying out some ideas and plans for release 3.7.5. There's some really fun work going on in GRC that I think everyone's going to love, and we're going to be one step closer to defaulting everything to QTGUI (don't worry! WXGUI will have a long lifetime as we migrate over!). We haven't made the full decision, yet, whether to switch the GRC defaults to QTGUI in this next release of wait until 3.7.6. I think we'll make that decision about midway through this release cycle to make sure we have enough time at get the development branch settled on that before the release.

Now, no guarantees, but I'm hoping we can get 3.7.5 out in time for GRCon14. That's a bit shorter than our normal time period between versions, but then again, we took a bit of extra time before 3.7.4. I think that it'd be nice going into the conference with a brand new version, plus a lot of features like some of the QTGUI and GRC updates are already done. We'll see what things look like by the end of August if it really makes sense to get 3.7.5 out the door by the conference.

Finally, I've said it elsewhere, and probably on other posts on this blog, but just a quick mention of 3.8. We have started collecting some ideas on what we're looking for with 3.8, but we haven't made any substantial efforts on it, yet. We're going to stick with 3.7 for a while longer because we feel like we're able to get a lot of work done with this API version without having to move on. In 3.8 we plan on updating our dependency list so we can be a little more free with features from our dependency libraries, and it'll help us fix a few holes we have in the runtime API that's causing some bugs that we've been tracking. But there's nothing really pushing us to a new API, yet, unlike our previous few API releases where we had some big changes. Instead, all of our big changes are all coming in our "minor" releases. But the only thing minor about it is our version naming scheme!

Release 3.7.3 and the WSR Hackfest

In case you missed the announcement, we've released version 3.7.3 of GNU Radio!

We're really pretty excited about this release. If you look at the news announcement or our changelog, you can see that we had many contributors to this release. It's also about a month overdue from our normal (though unspecified) timeline. But the result is something that we are really happy with.

One thing that strikes me with all of the contributions on this one is the amount people are really using GNU Radio for interesting stuff. They are testing all sorts of use cases, corner cases, and types of cases we don't yet have names for. Hard to find all of those issues without that kind of testing and use. So I feel good about the state of where we are with this version.

And then came the Workshop on Software Radio (WSR) in Karlsruhe. I presented two papers. The first was from Tim O'Shea and myself on our work on gr-benchmark and stats.gnuradio.org, and the second was on using our polyphase filterbank blocks in GNU Radio.

Following WSR, however, was our first European GNU Radio Hackfest. It was two and a half days and went brilliantly. Lots of fun, lots of good discussion, and lots of code written (and rewritten). There were a number of issues posted and pull requests made for new features or minor issues. In a way, it's a shame that some of these didn't make it into our 3.7.3 release, but we can't just keep waiting, so these will all make it into 3.7.4. I think we're just seeing a lot of interest and energy with the project and so we have to mark some time to get the releases out when we can.

We've logged our work from the hackfest as we always do. And I believe I have taken care of all issues and pull requests, so you'll find all the new (working and available stuff) already in the GNU Radio master branch.

Specifically, it was important to wrap up the loose ends of that hackfest as quickly as possible because we're heading right into our next hackfest at Ettus Research next week in California! So I expect more great stuff to come soon.

 

 

FOSDEM

Just on my way to FOSDEM (fosdem.org). I've never been, and I'm really looking forward to it, especially with the software radio dev room we have on Sunday.

We've been working hard on a lot of stuff in GNU Radio, as usual, and I hope to be able to show off some of this over the weekend. Here's some of the gear I'm bringing with me to hack on while we're there.

Boarded my flight. Be seeing some of you in Brussels!