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@dom-robinson dom-robinson released this 28 Oct 21:56
· 1412 commits to master since this release
v1.8.0
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Raspberry-NOAA-V2 (‘RN2’) - Release 1.8.0

Supported on Raspian BUSTER.

‘Defaulting to gnuradio’

A number of users have expressed an interested to support a wider variety of SDR hardware devices beyond those interfaced to the original default rtl-sdr cards through the rtl-fm based commands used in the associated drivers.

In the original incarnation of RN2 the NOAA captures were driven directly through the audio_processor scripts to use rtl_fm directly, and the METEOR-M2 captures were driven using a python script that was originally generated in gnuradio and used the OSMOCOM source block, which in turn uses the rtl_fm binary to interface to the SDR card.

Since gnuradio can allow interchange of such ‘source blocks’ this methodology potentially opens up RN2 to support wider SDR hardware options.

This release DOES NOT seek to provide immediate access to the wider hardware options, but it DOES allow the community to begin to interface their own hardware by modifying the gnuradio composer files (.grc files included in the /audio_processors/ folder, to export python (.py) scripts similar to those included for the SDR, to copy the modifications that must then be made manually to the .py to interface the python workflow to the RN2 workflow (documented in the examples provided) and to then use alternative hardware to capture the source .wav or .s / .qpsk files that then can be used in the /image_processors/ scripts.

On day one most users defaulting to ‘gnuradio’ in their settings.yml will see little difference to RN2, but over time the community can now look to a common method to introduce new hardware support to the project.

More details on the deeper code is included in the new README included in the audio_processors folder, which includes sample .grc files and annotation in the current 'default' .py files showing where edits must be manually made AFTER exporting the python from gnuradio composer to make the scripts work with the RN2 settings.

Cosmetics

The spectrogram has been moved from SOX generation to FFMPEG generation, and also is represented vertically instead of horizontally. In the next iteration it may be suitable to flip it along with the NORTHBOUND passes so that as displayed in webpanel the timeline will alway flow in the same direction as the pass images shown (interference bars will then correlate in parallel between the two). It also means that colour-schema and other elements in the spectrograms can be more customised by those who want to do so.

Enhancements

We have enabled as many enhancements as possible in the NOAA workflows, and the webpanel now includes a hyperlink to a ‘details’ page that contains much of the documentation from the wxtoimg command line manual that relates to each enhancement type. The list shows only those that there are scripts in the /image_processors/ folder - there are a couple purposefully left out, but would be easy to introduce for those keen to do so.

Kudos

  • @colinluthier for his continued support, critical eye and key work on various elements of the ‘plumbing’
  • @Cadair for git fu, many general code contributions and for sanity checks on a nearly daily basis!

@everyone for testing and being patient!

What's Changed

New Contributors

Full Changelog: v1.7.0...v1.8.0

Contributors

ajcollins, Cadair, and 11 other contributors
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