On February 5th and 6th of 2022, another virtual FOSDEM happened. I haven’t even started catching up on watching talks, but I did manage to watch the talks from the Free Software Radio devroom.
We had some nice content again:
GNU Radio
Josh Morman gave an update on GNU Radio 3.10. If you’ve been following the mailing list or the recent updates on GNU Radio 3.10, including the one at GRCon 2021, then there will be no surprises here, but it’s the most recent update on 3.10 (and the first since it was released), so it’s probably the best overview as of today. The highlight is possible an example of how to integrate CUDA blocks with GNU Radio.
One thing that I thoroughly enjoy about FOSDEM talks is people showing off cool and interesting applications using GNU Radio. Our FOSDEM regulars Daniel Estévez and JM Friedt presented on two such applications on opposite ends of the high-tech scale: Jean-Michel showcased how to transmit and receive Hellschreiber signals, using RTL-SDR dongles and a Raspberry Pi. Dani got access to signals from the Allen Telescope Array and Greenbanks Observatory to demodulate signals from Voyager 1. Daniel Winter, who had previously presented at GRCon, talked about joint communication and sensing using OFDM radar.
M17 and OpenWifi
These projects are entirely different projects in the Open Source radio space. M17 is a fully open digital communications protocol for VHF/UHF (and more), mostly aimed at amateur radio applications (terrestrial and space). Michelle Thompson gave a 6-minute overview.
OpenWifi is another recurring project at FOSDEM, with some great updates. It has new features, is more optimized and more.
Expanding on hardware
The open source hardware space is expanding, and it’s only natural that there is overlap with the radio spheres. We had two talks touch on LiteX, an open-source framework to create FPGA Cores and SoCs: Victor Omoniyi presented on a GNU Radio/LiteX accelerator using a FPGA-based PCIe co-processor, and Steve Kelley from Julia Computing on P2P SDR to GPU Streaming with Julia and LiteX. This latter talk combines a whole bunch of impressive open and proprietary technologies, including Julia (the language), Nvidia GPUs, a PCIe-based SDR (Fairwaves XTRX), and of course LiteX.
New Technologies
These talks contained a whole bunch of interesting new technologies that may not be obvious from just reading the abstracts. For example, I had not been observing Amaranth (formerly known as nMigen), a Python-based HDL, even though it has been used in several well-known projects (such as the LUNA.
LiteX has been around for a while, but the fact that it featured in two talks (up from zero last year) tells me this is becoming more relevant.
And OpenWifi, while expanding its capabilities and qualities, seems to have spawned yet more devboards to try it on (such as ANTSDR, which looks a lot like a PLUTO clone, and the PYNQ SDR Hat, also AD9361-based).