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  • Author Author: Nitin_Bhaskar
  • Date Created: Date Created
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Beaglebone Black Radio challenge - First step(setting up SDR)

Nitin_Bhaskar

Thanks element14 for selecting my design for Beaglebone Black Radio Challenge. I own a Beaglebone(first generation) so i have some prior experience in handling this new beauty(BBB).

 

My project aims in designing a radio using SDR and internet. The radio's interface(GUI) shall be Qt/GTK based. Provision of searching, storing and recording of channel shall be added. The audio output is using a USB sound card. The initial step is make RTL_SDR talk to Beaglebone Black.

 

Building rtl-sdr software


First, install cmake and libusb on Beaglebone by running 

opkg install cmake
opkg install libusb*dev


Check out the rtl-sdr source and build it as described below,


git clone git://git.osmocom.org/rtl-sdr.git
cd rtl-sdr/
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ../
make
sudo make install

 

This completes the installation. Now its time to test it by running

 

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/local/lib rtl_test -t

 

Below is output i  got,

Found 1 device(s):
  0:  Realtek, RTL2838UHIDIR, SN: 00000001

Using device 0: Generic RTL2832U OEM
Found Rafael Micro R820T tuner
Supported gain values (29): 0.0 0.9 1.4 2.7 3.7 7.7 8.7 12.5 14.4 15.7 16.6 19.7 20.7 22.9 25.4 28.0 29.7 32.8 33.8 36.4 37.2 38.6 40.2 42.1 43.4 43.9 44.5 48.0 49.6
Sampling at 2048000 S/s.
No E4000 tuner found, aborting.

Success!!!!!

My next step would be to get usb audio to work. Looks like I have to disable HDMI output for this.

  • in reply to onebeartoe

    Hi Roberto,

     

    My next post will be on that!!!!

     

    -Nitin

  • Nice post, Bhaskar! 

     

    Last night I followed your steps to setup rtl_test, with the Adafruit radio antenna attached.

     

    I am super new to rtl and eventually found the rtl_fm command.  I tried different combinations of rtl_fm piped to sox and aplay, but was only successful in hearing radio static from the speakers.

     

    Can you provide some guidance on how to issue an rtl command to play FM frequency 104.5, and output the sound to speakers?


    Thanks,

     

    Roberto

  • in reply to shabaz

    Hi Shabaz,

    Thanks for your quick reply image.  "LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/local/lib rtl_test -t" is one single command. Regarding USB audio, BBB recognizes the connected device but when i play an audio file, no output on headphones. I shall try out instructions mentioned in your post. Thanks image

  • Hi Nitin,

     

    Great stuff! And glad you're documenting it step-by-step. Looking forward to trying this out too.

    I've only tried the SDR dongle on Windows so far.

    (by the way a carriage-return is missing before "rtl_test -t", so you might want to edit that).

    I think the USB audio should work just fine as soon as you plug in the USB soundcard and then direct the audio to USB soundcard instead of HDMI, depending on the software application (default may still be HDMI, not sure). See here for some old notes on this, to know what the name of the USB soundcard device may be.