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GNU Radio for Android

I have been slowly pushing out information here and there on my work on Android. I've been able to show it off at various conferences and workshops that I've attended over the past few months. It gets a lot of very positive feedback, and we know there are many, many exciting things we as a community of developers and wireless experts can do with this kind of a system.

It's time to start really pushing this project. I spent so much time getting things to work under the hood that I've completely lost track of any of the cool applications that I wanted to work on with it! But the more people that get access to this and know how to work with it, the more interesting the application space and possibilities will become. Because of that, I had been waiting for two things to finish before writing this post. First, I wanted to be able to use a bus-powered Ettus Research USRP with and Android device. And second, I wanted the process documented from the start of building the dependencies to the end of a working (if overly simple) app. Both of those are done.

To help get things started, I've created an Android support page on the gnuradio.org wiki:

  • http://gnuradio.org/redmine/projects/gnuradio/wiki/Android

This page is designed to walk a developer through all of the stages from building the dependencies to GNU Radio itself, GRAnd, UHD, RTL-SDR, and gr-omsosdr. This should be pretty much copy-and-paste to get everything built and ready. The final part was finished just today: a walk-through for how to build a basic Android application that launches a GNU Radio flowgraph. This is done using Android Studio, which is the latest development environment for building Android apps. The project can be downloaded from it's Github page to provide a template to set up your own project and verify a working installation:

  • https://github.com/trondeau/GrTemplate

Hopefully, we will continue to evolve the process to make setup and building apps easier in the future. The next step is walking through and providing the annoying boilerplate stuff for hardware access so you can start using USRPs and RTL-SDRs with your devices. But for right now, I want to make sure people who are excited about this stuff have a way to get in and start playing.

List of what we support on Android

So where do we stand with our GNU Radio support on Android?

  • GNU Radio components:
    • Runtime, VOLK, Blocks, FFT, Filter, Analog, Digital, UHD
    • ControlPort
  • Extras
    • gr-osmosdr including RTL-SDR and UHD support
      • HackRF support should be trivial but not done, yet
    • gr-grand: GRAnd (GNU Radio for Android) to support Android-specific I/O and capabilities such as:
      • audio input and output
      • shared buffers between app and flowgraph
      • sensors (e.g., accelerometer and luminosity)
  • Tested hardware
    • RTL-SDRs
    • USRP B200 and B210 (the latter required external power on a Nexus 7)
  • Android Version
    • Android Lollipop 5.0 or greater. Tested on 5.1.1
      • some complex support in previous versions is lacking in the ndk; we think we can get around it, just not out-of-the-box.