If you don't follow our commit messages or look at the main GNU Radio website often, I just wanted to point out a few of the major changes that are going on in the project. First, our website, gnuradio.org, is being updated with the goal of making it more useful and better looking. A huge shout-out and thanks to Martin Braun for his help with this. Martin did the reorganization of the content and layout, which I think makes a huge impact on the accessibility of the information and knowledge in the page. He also helped craft the new look to the web page.
We've also been working hard on pushing towards the next release, v3.5. This release will include a lot of new features.
- New top-level blocks to help organize what's available in GNU Radio as well as make the build and rebuilds simpler
- gr-digital: moves most of the digital modulation-specific blocks the gnuradio.digital namespace. This also makes some changes to the API of a few blocks to simplify and improve their performance.
- gr-vocoder: moves all of the vocoder capabilities into one place under gnuradio.vocoder.
- UHD examples: all of our examples are being migrated over to using UHD instead of either a usrp or usrp2 interface. This should make all examples usable by any of the Ettus products.
- Cmake: a huge change to the build system is coming up. Specifically, we hope to switch our build system from autotools to cmake. This has a few benefits:
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- Simplify the installation process
- Improve the supported platforms of GNU Radio (including adding Volk to all of the known supported platforms)
- Makes building deb (and presumably rpm) packages for all components easier. Expect us to start supporting GNU Radio releases through apt-get (from our own server) soon (fingers crossed).
- We aim to have both the autotools and cmake build structures in place in parallel with the intent of making cmake the default. The autotools is a back up build system for people who experience problems with cmake. Eventually, if cmake becomes problem-free, we will likely remove the autotools completely in v3.6 (maybe...).
Those are just some of the changes we've been making to the code and overall project. I'm sure I will post more soon, especially as we get ready to release 3.5.