Limesdr on odroid xu3

Alex,

THANKS so much…!! I will try that and report back - - stay tuned for more…

73 de Marty, KN0CK

Alex,

Just reporting back - sorry for the delay. Worked like a champ…! I revised the 64-limesuite.conf file to accommodate the alternative you suggested and now the LimeSDR is recognized on the Rock64 running USB 3.0. About all I have left to do is recompile GQRX to see if it will see the Lime on my Rock64 and then it’s all done - I’ll have a drive image for a Pi-sized ARM board that runs 1.56 GHz and USB 3.0 - - THAT could be the real Pi-killer for LimeSDR.

More as I have it - stay tuned…

73 de Marty, KN0CK

What kernel do they support… it seems to be an odroid-c2 with X2 the ram and a USB3 port (bonus!!!)

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@Kc7noa - Mike,

I will check that out and let you know - I’m jazzed about this little Pine Rock64…It’s gonna be the Pi-Killer for LimeSDR…!

EDIT: Kernel is Xenial (at least that’s what flashed by when I read it) :slight_smile:

More to follow - stay tuned… :slight_smile:
73 de Marty, KN0CK

Xeinal is Ubuntu 16

Type uname -a in a termimal

Looks good.
Another really small (75mm x 40mm) $35 SBC that’s surprisingly fast is the FriendlyArm nanoPi Fire3, it even appears faster than the ODROID-C2 which has 2GB memory against the Fire3’s 1GB.

8 A53 cores, 1.4GHz CPU frequency, Gigabit Ethernet and a Raspberry Pi compatible 40 pin GPIO
Just one USB USB 2.0 port -> external hub -> Keyboard, Mouse and a 500GB USB 2.0 hard drive.
root@NanoPi-Fire3:/usr/src/linux# cat /etc/os-release
NAME=“Ubuntu”
VERSION=“16.04.4 LTS (Xenial Xerus)”

I compiled a new kernel on it this afternoon on the microSD card. I didn’t check the compile time but when I checked back on it I was surprised it had done it.

Next I’ll be building the LimeSDR software and may be gnuradio 3.7.11 as the repository only has 3.7.9 packages.

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I know there can be OpenGL issues sometimes. The Mali 450MP4 graphics will comply with Open GL ES1.1/2.0 .
I think that is OpenGL for embedded. Just something to watch. Not sure how it acts, in comparison to normal OpenGL.
I have also looked into adding a “Crystal clear HD” mPCIe card for a tad more coprocessing to the Udoo Ultra.
Funny thing, I bought a PCIe card, because it had some nice stuff & an FPGA. Turns out it’s a SORA SDR card. No TX or RX unit, but after install, I had OpenGL all the way to 4.6… It first got identified as a coprocessor. SCORE ! I need to find radios for it. Might be fun.

Ed

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Having only one usb … that sounds problematic …

Lime with keyboard and mouse

When I run Angel SDR it still complains about the video not supported. Should Mali- 400 be supported yet?

Happy to report that I have got gqrx running on an XU3 using a LimeSDR as the radio, and displaying to the HDMI port at 1920*1080. So far no recurrency of the black screen bug - I suspect the Mali driver has been updated

I used the ubuntu 16.04 image on an eMMC card, and added the recommended PPAs for limesdr and soapy. It nearly worked without manual hacking…

Things I had to hack by hand

  1. gr-osmosdr for ARM is not compiled for soapy, so you must download libsoapysdr-dev, then build gr-osmosdr, then copy the new libgnuradio-osmosdr.so.0.1.4 to /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf. Do NOT uninstall gr-osmosdr, since make install does not install osmocom_fft etc.

  2. To get the headphone socket to work -
    as supplied it’s an XU4 image, so edit /media/boot/boot.ini and add
    setenv board_name “xu3”
    just before it selects the .dtb to be loaded

you’ll need to select headphones in pavucontrol. NOTE: gqrx hangs with no graphical window if pulseaudio isn’t running

With graphics running and LimeSDR over USB3, my limit is 3.5 Mbits sample rate - beyond this the audio gets choppy. You still need to select Other : device string soapy=0,driver=lime to select the LimeSDR

At last the XU3 is usable, now I can explore the LimeSDR further.

Try a highrr sample with decimation at 8 …

I run 4.5M and decimation of 8 to keep usb throughput under 600k on my C2

I have decided to get a rock64 with 4 gigs of RAM just simply for the USB3.0 through put …

I hope to hear with that config the line SDR can receive and transmit simultaneously …