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:
- A hackfest hosted by Ettus Research.
- A GNU Radio Hacking Workshop before NEWSDR (details to come).
- A FOSS and GNU Radio session at the Wireless@VT Symposium.
- SRIF 2015 with Mobicom (details to come).
- GRCon15 (we're very close to announcing a date and location).
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.