IDEAS

Hi all... This is about using the poor man's SDR dongle ( RTL2832U ) with GNU Radio to receive Commercial FM stations ( Wideband FM stations)... Installation of GNU Radio was a breeze in Ubuntu 12.04 using the build script by Marcus Leech.. thank to him... My core 2 duo machine took 2 hours to build the whole thing... :) Being a total noob in the complex base-band world, i decided to try something for getting familiarized with GNU Radio.. Opened gnuradio-companion.. Tried out some examples. Most of them were based on USRP  SDR Transceiver. But the source block listed the support of RT2832U to be used as a source.. thanks to osmocom . So now i decided to create a WFM receiver in GNU Radio with IQ signals collecting from poor man's receiver. Hooked the SDR dongle.. checked with some similar implementations over internet.. Created a LPF, WFM receive block, GUI Waterfall Sink block, Audio Sink block. Spend a considerable amount of time in understanding all parameters ...

Hi all...        I was totally excited after receiving the RTL-SDR dongle, the poor man's Software Defined Radio Receiver. I hooked it up to see the beautiful spectrum of signals in SDR# software.   And it worked like awesome. The blue waterfall is just awesome.... I wanted to test the device as fast as i could...But since i live in a villlage with no Commercial FM coverage, it semed to difficult to get hold to any strong RF signals.. Still i could get some random energies in 945-960 Mhz GSM band...pretty noisy... digital data.. so not much to be heard to... After some random browsing, i came across a beautiful project to make the Rasp Pi transmit in Wide Band FM mode. The project name is PiFm . It is a nice simple example of SDR transmitter. So without any hardware for FM modulation, a 300 lines C code modulates the DPLL output of Pi's ARM Processor with respect to the digital music data from a wave file. "Kudos to the guys who did it..". The output com...

Hi all... this is about DIY programming cable.... for your HAM radio... Various  programming cables can be found in eBay at high prices. But the fact is that all these cables are UART - USB converters either in 3.3V or 5V TTL. Radios whether it be Icom, Yaseu, Baofeng, Motorola , all can be programmed with a single cable , once you know what are the connector pinouts... Here i am going to explain this with help of my Baofeng UV-5RE, which is a 5W VHF/UHF handheld radio. It has a 2.5mm and 3.5mm jack for connecting programming cable, headset+mic. Depending on what you connect, the radio responds to it... The ring, tip, sleeve on both jacks have various signal designations. So for this DIY programming cable , our point of interest are on 1. 3.5 mm sleeve   (Rx Data) 2. 2.5 mm ring      (Tx Data) 3. 2.5 mm sleeve  (GND Data) So what we need to have before starting.. 1. A modified nokia DKU-5 or CA-42 cable (USB-UART converter). See i...

Hi guys.. Its time to understand some parallel programming. OpenCL seems to be the best candidate in this area. Being its specification fully open and adaptable to different  hardware platforms there is a huge leap towards it.       Parallel programming means taming parallel hardware... Mmm.. offcourse GPUs are the easily accessible parallel things...then comes the FPGAs.. then some mighty DSP processors... and also 32-64 core processing units... etc:.... So OpenCL specification is available for all above platforms. Vendors like Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, Altera, Tilera have already come forward with their SDKs for harnessing parallel beasts... So why don't join the league..  ??? As a user what u can do is to identify a platform cost effective to you.. and start coding.. You are in luck if u have some AMD ATi HD5400 series or above graphic card sitting silently (roaring mostly.. :) ) in your PC and an x86 CPU. What u will need is just some free software packages....

Hi all.. lets do another beautiful DIY device... It will be a USB-UART dongle using Nokia Data Adapter DKU-5. What is it ??? A USB-UART dongle mimics a serial COM on PC. So... modern PCs lack DB-9 RS232 ports , but has plenty of USB ports. So there comes a lot of needs while you want to connect some boards ( Embedded linux boards, android TV boxes, Raspberry Pi, Beagle Board, FPGA kits, router/modem, HAM radio (ICOM/BAOFENG)  ) to your PC for low level debugging or programming. Since UART being the simplest of communications, all these board have a 3.3v or 5v TTL UART header to be hooked up... This header may consist of a Vcc,Tx,Rx,Gnd pins at one of above TTL voltages. So what we need to connect here is a UART- USB converter. Ebay can help you with cheap converters.. But it doesn't have the beauty of a DIY. So what i need ?? 1. Old DKU-5 nokia data adapter (CA-42 also works, but i had a DKU-5 only) 2. Some wires , soldering iron, strippers etc.. By luck CA-42...

So what after buying R Pi , the much hyped little supercomputer. You bought it with a huge urge for learning phython and develop some cool devices. But then you realise to setup a programming environment u need a keyboard, a mouse, network, a pricey HDMI display. (I swear any RCA  TV or monitor is too low in quality for an programming geek.)        So now your little but brilliant mind start asking why can't i connect and work R pi to my PC/Laptop.   Who can help you... ?????      Praise linux ... thanks to SSH and X window system .... SSH is a protocol , remote login facility for any linux system from another network device. X window is the aplication which runs a GUI in any linux OS. eg:- it runs LXDE on pi and GNOME on Ubuntu . The best thing about X window is that it is forward-able through  SSH protocol... !!  So what is the setup ??? Ingrediants:   1. A linux/ Windows PC ; which is your ...

Hi all.. Shortly received my Raspberry pi... i took my byte... :) I don't have HDMI capable display or an RCA monitor when i received the device.. But the eagerness was so high to think about an RCA video to VGA conversion, since my PC monitor is VGA capable only and was immediately available with me. I have an Altera DE2-115 FPGA board with Cyclone IV FPGA. It is a future perfect development board with a bunch of multimedia capabilities and large I/O options (still lacking HDMI ).       It have a RCA Video In plug. It also have a VGA output connector. So i thought of connecting Rasp pi RCA output to the DE2-115 board. And VGA out of DE2-115 to my PC monitor. The starter CD with DE2-115 have a TV Box Demonstration program. Refer to the DE2-115 User manual  (page 55). Loaded the .mcs file of  TV Box  program to Cyclone FPGA. Connected and powered Raspberry Pi. Voila... The raspberry fruit logo and boot messages started scrolling up.. and finall...