Tag: guile scheme

HackRF Shell: Progress Update

thequietlearner1 Comment

I added in the baseband-filter-bandwidth control procedure, which is something I forgot to do earlier. This was critical for picking up the weaker stations, such as KJNP 100.3Mhz, which is around 20 or 30 miles away, I think. I coded some simple helper functions (in Scheme) to start and stop receiving data according to time parameters, which I will use to record my favorite radio program each morning. This example records data for one minute from 8:43pm to 8:44pm (code checkout a992f67).

scheme@(guile-user)> (define d (hackrf-open))
scheme@(guile-user)> (load "hackrf-shell-lib.scm")
scheme@(guile-user)> (hackrf-sensible-defaults d)
scheme@(guile-user)> (hackrf-set-baseband-filter-bandwidth d 2000000)
scheme@(guile-user)> (define c (hackrf-cb-rx-to-file "out.bin"))
scheme@(guile-user)> (hackrf-enable-amp d)
scheme@(guile-user)> (timed-read d "out.bin" 20 43 20 44)

This still just dumps the floating point signal data to a file, rather that doing any demodulation, so the file size is very large, and I must feed it into GnuRadio. Yet, it is progress.

I need to go over the RX start/stop code again as I get an error if I try to start RX again after stopping it. I coded that part of the device management rather quickly so I am not surprised.

I started playing around with merging in FFT functionality. I added an fft-512 procedure which does FFT on a 512 byte buffer using libfftwf. I think it works, but I haven’t added any procedures yet to do anything useful with fft-512 so I don’t really know yet. I was going to code something which feeds data to GnuPlot for a spectrum analysis display, in the usual fashion like all the SDR software does:

I have been learning a lot lately about Fourier transform and DFT (Discrete Fourier Transform) and I think I have a mostly clear understanding of the basic math and concepts involved now. For fun, I did a DFT operation manually in Emacs Calc on a length 8 data sample, and the results came out making sense. This article is a nice introduction to the Fourier transform, though you need to have a good understanding of complex numbers to fully grasp the DFT equation:

An Interactive Guide to the Fourier Transform

HackRF Shell: Conversion to Floating Point

thequietlearner2 Comments

As expected, the bottle neck has disappeared at the floating point conversion. At least, I can say that I didn’t have trouble pulling 8 million samples per second (msps), which with 32 bit floating point (and 2 floating point numbers per sample) is 64 MB/sec. (I am short on time this evening, so I haven’t had a chance yet to try 20 msps.) As before, I fed the data into a Gnu Radio FM demodulator and got clean FM radio station audio out of it.

GCC 6.3 with -O3 appears to do some SSE optimization on the byte buffer to float buffer conversion:

christopher@nightshade:~/Repos/hackrf-shell$ objdump hackrf-shell -x -D | less
<snip>
    172c:       66 0f 6f c1             movdqa %xmm1,%xmm0
    1730:       66 0f 68 cc             punpckhbw %xmm4,%xmm1
    1734:       66 0f 60 c4             punpcklbw %xmm4,%xmm0
    1738:       66 0f 6f f1             movdqa %xmm1,%xmm6
    173c:       66 0f 65 e8             pcmpgtw %xmm0,%xmm5
    1740:       66 0f 6f f8             movdqa %xmm0,%xmm7
    1744:       66 0f 61 fd             punpcklwd %xmm5,%xmm7
    1748:       66 0f 69 c5             punpckhwd %xmm5,%xmm0
    174c:       66 0f 6f eb             movdqa %xmm3,%xmm5
    1750:       0f 5b ff                cvtdq2ps %xmm7,%xmm7
    1753:       66 0f 65 e9             pcmpgtw %xmm1,%xmm5
    1757:       0f 17 3c 24             movhps %xmm7,(%rsp)
<snip>

The next thing, perhaps, should be to create a little demo program where it captures the data at certain times of day. Or I could work on the next stages of an FM receiver, i.e., frequency multiplication, a low pass filter, and the FM demodulator.