On Wed, May 5, 2021 at 4:28 AM Jessica Chen <jessica.san.chen@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear all,My main goal is to simply get the HackRF One FM receiver to work on GRC. In short, I’ve tried:- GNU Radio installation on Ubuntu 20.04 via PPAs, PyBOMBS, and source. Unfortunately, no variation yields the osmocom source I need. Additional attempts to install gr-osmosdr, via default packet managers, git, and source, have failed, largely due to version incompatibilities.- The same processes worked on a Kali Linux virtual machine (PPAs and PyBOMBS failed, both source installation worked). However, this was a messy installation, and 3 tests failed during make test (see below).- GRC on Kali Linux fails to make the HackRF1 FM receiver (see below). I’ve been able to get the FM receiver to work on GQRX (Ubuntu) with the same hardware, so it shouldn’t be a hardware problem.- Other simple tutorial flow graphs fail to run on my Kali Linux GRC.Any help would be very much appreciated:- How do I get gr-osmosdr on Ubuntu GRC? I know others have ran into this problem on the mailing list archives, but I feel like I’ve already ran through every suggestion. Please let me know if you feel like I’ve missed any.- Why is the FM receiver on my Kali GRC not working? Is it just because I’m missing some fundamental knowledge on SDRs, or is this problem rooted in installation?- Should I separate my problems into multiple threads?Longer overview of what I've tried so far. It’s still truncated from my original documentation, so please feel free to ask for an even longer version.- [DEFAULT] On Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, apt-get installed hackrf and gnuradio (gnuradio-config-info --version returns 3.8.1.0). However, there's no osmocom source.- [PYBOMBS] Since archives recommended PyBOMBS installation for gr-osmosdr over source installation, I followed instructions here (https://github.com/gnuradio/pybombs/) to install PyBOMBS. However, I ran into problems "while building package libvolk."- [LIBVOLK] It seems a lot of people ran into a similar problem, so I followed suggestions here (https://github.com/gnuradio/gnuradio/issues/3814) to set "gitarg: --recursive" in libvolk.lwr. However, I found that my version already had this recursive setting, so my libvolk error was independent of the discussion on GitHub.- [SOURCE] Followed instructions here (https://wiki.gnuradio.org/index.php/InstallingGR#From_Source) to install GNU Radio from source. As recommended, I installed volk first with no problems. I ran into an error with pybind but I fixed it with the recommended conda installation (python3-pybind11 did not work). I reached the end of installation with minimal errors, but still no OSMOCOM.- [PYBOMBS] Some people recommended using PyBOMBS to install gr-osmosdr, so I tried it. This time, got past libvolk error, but ran into error intsalling gr-iqbal! I tried a long fix, detailed here (https://hackmd.io/@j-chen/HJROJK8L_), but it didn't work. At some point, I realized my gnuradio-config-info --version returns "v3.10.0.0git-265-g5547665e."- [PPA] As such, I tried to "clean" Ubuntu using the top-voted answer here (https://askubuntu.com/questions/859448/is-there-a-command-to-factory-reset-ubuntu) (which I know doesn't actually clean it) and PPA re-installed GNU Radio 3.8 AND 3.9 (tried both separately; neither magically worked).- [OSMO SOURCE] Followed instructions here (https://osmocom.org/projects/gr-osmosdr/wiki) to install gr-osmosdr from source. However, I ran into an error that most likely stemmed from version changes from boost:shared_ptr to std::shared_ptr. (/home/cvr/Documents/venv/hackrf/gr-osmosdr/lib/fcd/fcd_source_c.cc:147:36: error: no matching function for call to ‘fcd_source_c::connect(gr::fcdproplus::fcd::sptr&, int, gr::hier_block2::opaque_self, int)’) (I had ran into this error before too.)- Here, I gave up on Ubuntu and simply took someone's suggestion to move to Kali Linux on a virtual machine.- [PYBOMBS] Tried using PyBOMBS to install GNU Radio, but could not due to "Package has no install method: qt5". I also couldn't use Kali's default packet manager to install qt5. This issue is still open here (https://github.com/gnuradio/pybombs/issues/555).- [DEFAULT] Simply tried sudo apt-get install gnuradio (3.8), hackrf, cmake. Still no gr-osmosdr. Tried installing gr-osmosdr from git clone, but version incompatible pops up ("request version 3.9).- [PPA] Since 3.9 was requested, I tried PPA installation, but it turns out that Kali does not support PPAs. I tried a workaround method that turned out to be deprecated, so aborted this attempt before it truly broke anything.- [SOURCE] Followed instructions to install from source exactly (https://wiki.gnuradio.org/index.php/InstallingGR#From_Source). Failed 3 tests, but it worked--OSMOCOM finally shows up!- FM receiver: ran into problems with xterm (resolved), "set_fft_window_normalized" (seemed to be another 3.9 version incompatibility; swig solve didn't work; I ended up forcefully removing the line in source code), but things overall worked.HOWEVER, I still couldn't get FM receiver to workSometimes it would run, other times it would show an error.I also tried using GQRX, which worked, so it's confirmed to not be a hardware issue.Thinking it was a problem with my GRC knowledge, I tried going through the GNU Radio tutorials, but realized I'm still running issues then. For example, running IQ_tutorial_AM_TX_real.grc (https://wiki.gnuradio.org/images/9/9f/IQ_tutorial_AM_TX_real.grc), I get this error:TypeError: init() takes from 5 to 6 positional arguments but 7 were given
I tried implementing solutions found here (https://github.com/gnuradio/gnuradio/issues/3664) but the same error persists.I've also tried starting from source in a new Ubuntu virtual machine, and to confirm, this also doesn't have gr-osmosdr.Apologies for the very long email. It's very possible I'm facing multiple problems at once, but I'm not sure exactly how to separate these into different threads.Any advice would be greatly appreciated!Best,Jessica