[Discuss-gnuradio] gr-osmosdr driver development

[Pablo Leyva Camacho]

Hi everyone!

I have a couple of questions regarding the developing an osmosdr source/sink driver.

Today I have found that a couple of years ago, in the company I am working, some of my coworkers developed a FPGA based SDR platform for a private client. I have asked for the specifications and they are quite impressive; center frequency tunable from to 0-6GHz, 250Msps (I&Q), full-duplex… There are a few boards still lying around in the office and I would like to integrate them in gnuradio as a personal project. I am pretty sure that is going to be hard, but I will learn a lot in the process and it will be a great personal satisfaction.

I am an FPGA guy (I develop DSP IP cores for FPGA) but I have already developed kernel drivers for Linux to interconnect our software layer with our processing chains in the FPGAs. But all of them were quite tailored for our requirements in each protect, so I have always defined my own interfaces and never work with interfaces defined by others.

I am having a look at https://github.com/osmocom/gr-osmosdr to have a general idea about how other SDR platforms have implemented this interface, but I would like to know if you have some recommendations about where to start o how to guide the proyect.

The platform itself is a ZYNQ FPGA with an embedded linux running in the ARM processor. In the old project all the processing and interfacing with the DAC, ADC, PLLs, VGAs, was implemented on the FPGA and the Linux system was handling some control and connectivity stuff over Ethernet.

Instead of connecting the board directly to the USB of a computer (the platform has only usb 2.0 and avoiding all the usb driver stuff would be great) I was thinking about running gnuradio in the zynq system with a really simple flowgraph; Source/sink drivers, TCP conection and xmlrpc block to control all the parameters. Doing all the “real” processing in my host computer and sending to the board the processed data via Ethernet.

Every comment, suggestion, reference, guide or critic is more than welcome! I would like to hear your opinions and if you have any question feel free to ask!

Thanks for your time and greetings from Munich !!!

Pablo.