4 Jan 2010 Emphasize this page is for OS X 10.4 only, also change gnuradio.org/trac to /redmine
To install GNU Radio on recent Mac hardware and operating systems, consult the Build Guide and Mac Install pages at the GNU Radio Wiki:
http://vps.gnuradio.org/redmine/wiki/gnuradio/BuildGuide,
MacInstall
These pages describe our installation of GNU
Radio 3.0 and 3.1 with the USRP hardware on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger on PPC Macs.
Overview
Building the USRP modules
Using the USRP
The USRP is the GNU
Radio hardware. The usrp and gr-usrp modules in the GNU Radio
software support the USRP.
The usrp and gr-usrp modules are built at the same time as the other GNU Radio
modules, as directed in the build
configuration.
To use the USRP, your Mac must have a USB 2.0 port. You can check
this by running System Profiler (Menu Bar Apple Icon -> About This Mac
-> More Info ...). Under Hardware click on USB, under USB Device Tree
there should be an entry USB High Speed Bus.
Older Macs do not have a USB 2.0 port. My 1 GHz G4 Powerbook only has
USB 1.1 (purchased Summer 2003, apparently the last Mac without USB
2.0). I obtained one of the USB 2.0 add-in cards
recommended by Apple: the Belkin F5U222.
It plugs into the Powerbook's cardbus slot and is automatically
recognized by OS X; it is not necessary to install any drivers or do
any other configuring.
Power up the USRP and plug its USB cable into one of the Mac's USB 2.0
ports. Before you run any GNU Radio USRP programs, the Mac should
detect the USRP's presence, as shown in the System Profiler
(screenshot).
The first time you run any USRP program, the GNU Radio software
downloads FPGA code into the USRP. After that, the Mac
recognizes the USRP
(screenshot).
There are programs for testing and demonstrating the USRP in the
installed GNU Radio directories in gr/bin
Overview
Building gr-wxgui
Using the USRP
| usrp_siggen.py | Signal generator |
| usrp_oscope.py | Oscilloscope (screenshot) |
| usrp_fft.py | Spectrum analyzer (screenshot) |
Use the -h option to see the command line options, for example pythonw usrp_oscope.py -h (the USRP doesn't need to be connected for this).
You can run usrp_siggen and usrp_oscope (or usrp_fft) at the same time (starting them from different terminal windows), connecting the TX output from one to the RX input of the other.
In December 2005, GNU Radio + USRP on the Mac achieved throughputs of 2 to 4 MBytes/sec, which is sufficient for transfering audio frequency signals between the Mac host and the USRP:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/discuss-gnuradio/2005-12/msg00225.html
To cope with these throughputs, you must use the -i (interpolation) argument for TX output, or the -d (decimation) argument for RX input. For example:
| python usrp_siggen.py -i256 |
| pythonw usrp_oscope.py -g0 -f0 -d256 |
UPDATE: Faster USB support is now included in the GNU Radio usrp module, so you might see better performance than reported above:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/discuss-gnuradio/2006-05/msg00027.html
Jon Jacky, jon@u.washington.edu
