Having trouble setting up the Novena-RF

Projects Novena-RF
1

Hello everyone,

I have followed steps at https://myriadrf.org/blog/installing-the-novena-rf-driver-and-gnu-radio/ and managed to compile SoapySDR and the host and kernel packages from the Novena-RF repo (since I’m running a 4.4 kernel). When I issue:

SoapySDRUtil --make="driver=novena"

then I get the same output as in the blog post (the post shows one dash instead of two btw). But when I issue:

/usr/lib/uhd/examples/rx_ascii_art_dft --rate=1e6 --freq=1.8e9 --gain=30 --ref-lvl=-60

(again, two dashes for the --ref-lvl part) then I get the following error:

linux; GNU C++ version 4.9.1; Boost_105500; UHD_003.007.003-0-unknown

UHD Warning:
    Unable to set the thread priority. Performance may be negatively affected.
    Please see the general application notes in the manual for instructions.
    EnvironmentError: OSError: error in pthread_setschedparam

Creating the usrp device with: ...
Error: LookupError: KeyError: No devices found for ----->
Empty Device Address

On the kosagi forums there are a couple of suggestions like creating a symbolic link and such, but none of the solutions worked for me. So SoapySDRUtil sees my Novena-RF but UHD doesn’t.

I also tried building gr-osmosdr from source, but cmake gives me an error that the version of gnuradio that I have is too old, even though I’m using the same version of gnuradio and uhd as in the blog post. Anyone else facing the same issues?

2

I got the UHD part working now. Apparently you also need to install SoapyUHD, which was not mentioned in the blog post, so it might be useful to add it there.

That still leaves the issue with gr-osmosdr. I could of course try to compile it from source, but since it was mentioned in the blog post which specific versions were used, one would expect it work with those versions.