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hackrf

Ready to…

If you haven’t heared about the hackRF jet, you probably slept under a rock. But you can wake up now since…. here is the newest beta, fedex’ed right to me from Michael Ossman:

hackrf_jawbreaker

It’s fully Open Source, which means you can self-assemble the device, look into the CAD and generate derivatives:

kicad-hackrf

In the following I document my personal tests, because that’s why this device is here ;) Since the device some day will ship to people… maybe this article comes in handy. It’s work in progress, that contains some hints on how to setup your personal HackRF on Linux.

Get started

  1. Get hold of libuhd and install it, then install GR 3.6 (I use the release, not Git tree)
  2. clone the hackRF Git and perform an installation of the host stuff (cmake ./ -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/ on Arch Linux e.g. for libhackrf etc.).
  3. get GrOsmoSDR – if you completed 2. – the blocks need GR
  4. look at the Flow-Graph for the HackRF parameters, which are to be issued to the OsmoSDR API

It should look like this now (assuming you plugged the Jawbreaker in):

Now configure udev: lsusb shows something like: “Bus 002 Device 008: ID 1d50:604b OpenMoko, Inc” – so that you don’t need sudo any more to access the device.

shell

T:  Bus=02 Lev=02 Prnt=02 Port=01 Cnt=01 Dev#= 10 Spd=480 MxCh= 0
D:  Ver= 2.00 Cls=00(>ifc ) Sub=00 Prot=00 MxPS=64 #Cfgs=  1
P:  Vendor=1d50 ProdID=604b Rev=01.00
S:  Manufacturer=Great Scott Gadgets
S:  Product=HackRF
C:  #Ifs= 1 Cfg#= 1 Atr=80 MxPwr=500mA
I:  If#= 0 Alt= 0 #EPs= 2 Cls=ff(vend.) Sub=ff Prot=ff Driver=(none)

ACTION==”add”,
SUBSYSTEMS==”usb”,
ATTRS{idVendor}==”1d50″,
ATTRS{idProduct}==”604b},
GROUP:=”users”,
MODE:=”0660″

First Flow-Graph

The first thing I always do with a new SDR is a FFT plot.

flow-graph

Here we go… after adjusting the Flow-Graph to a new center-frequency (905 Mhz at 10 MHz bandwidth… maybe this looks like a transmission:

iq_graph

Who knows… but I will ;)

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2013 05 29 wishi Software Radio Comments Off Permalink

Moving information, creating knowledge

Beyond knowledge bases

Over the years I have archived over 2000 fascinating articles, which are mostly about IT security and related with IT system development and administration. I have grown interested in making the essence of this available. To do so a knowledge base is not enough, because commonly it’s a mere dumping ground with a full-text search and tags. I want to structure information and visualize it.

State of the art information visualization

The first thing necessary to archive this is a view. If you take a closer look at JavaScript libraries like the InfoVis Toolkit it nearly suggests itself, that such a modern animation is suitable. TreeMaps or Hypergraphs can visualize dimensions of information, which are easy to overlook: associations and weight (like the amount of content). Using JavaScript these days isn’t even reduced to 2D animations anymore, if you take a look at PhiloGL. Combined with JQuery and maybe with the Bootstrap library designing a visual entry point of a modern knowledge base seems to be straight forward.

Input / Output

Another interesting new technology is Chicago Boss. I have started to implement some simple controllers, which serialize persisted data into JSON. JS libs like InfoVis Toolkit work very well with it. Chicago Boss allows to do so in Erlang, and with very few lines of code. It’s a highly efficient web application framework, which due it’s useful MVC design-pattern can be utilized. It comes with a specific ORM, which also allows to use MongoDB as non-relational database.

 

So, when this ready I can finally publish again ;)

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2013 05 05 wishi Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink