Application Programming

ASSRP connected to 3m wire. Waterfall plot of RF aliased to baseband.

For this week, I chose to develop some software for a piece of hardware I built over the summer, the ASSRP or Andy's Simple Sofware Radio Peripheral. The ASSRP is a 20MS/s 14 bit USB digitizer designed for software radio and RADAR applications. The ASSRP is inspired by Ben's derivative of David's SSRP. Full details of the ASSRP (schematics, sources etc) are forthcoming.

Hardware

ASSRP Hardware revisions, most recent versions not pictured.

The ASSRP is built around a Cypress FX2 8051 USB microcontroller. With LibUSB, I stream raw USB data to a UNIX FIFO. This week I experimented with Python and GNURadio to display and analyze the raw data from this sensor.

A full discussion of the ASSRP hardware is out of the scope of this week's assignment, but I would be happy to share once the project has matured.

Waterfall Plot

ASSRP connected to 3m wire.

The first step to building a RF system is to have a look at the spectrum. I connected a simple antenna (3m of 22 awg wire - good for receiving 100MHz signals) and coded up this python script. I rely heavily on GNU Radio libraries and WX python.