Installing USRP Toolchain (UHD and GNU Radio) for Ettus B210 (on Ubuntu 18.04)

Installation of software for Ettus B210.

Part 1 2 April, 2020

  1. Follow instructions at https://kb.ettus.com/Building_and_Installing_the_USRP_Open-Source_Toolchain_(UHD_and_GNU_Radio)_on_Linux.
    • For UHD
      • git checkout v3.15.0.0-rc3
    • For GNU radio
      • Don’t do the below as it is more complicated and you don’t get the Instrumentation blocks in gnuradio-companion
        • git checkout v3.8.1.0-rc1

        • Since Ubuntu puts liblog4cpp in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu, I had to modify gnuradio/cmake/Modules/FindLOG4CPP.cmake: (before running cmake ../):

          PATHS /usr/lib /usr/lib64 /usr/local/lib  /usr/local/lib64 /opt/local/lib /opt/local/lib64 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu
        • export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/local/lib:/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu
        • export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:/usr/local/lib/python3/dist-packages
      • Do this https://launchpad.net/~gnuradio/+archive/ubuntu/gnuradio-releases
  2. Install Pothosware using instructions from https://github.com/pothosware/PothosCore/wiki/Ubuntu
    • export UHD_IMAGES_DIR=/usr/local/share/uhd/images
  3. Then I got the error RuntimeError: Expected FPGA compatibility number 14, but got 16
    • So I installed UHD v3.12.0.0 instead as it is the latest version with compatibility number 14, cycled the Ettus radio and rebooted the Ubuntu machine
    • That finally worked and I could include a UHD source block in gnuradio-companion

Part 2 3 April, 2020

All was well but I couldn’t make gr-specest work so let’s try using PyBombs.

  1. Remove UHD and GNU radio 
    cd ~/src/ettus/uhd/host/build/
sudo make uninstall
sudo apt-get uninstall gnuradio
  2. Install PyBombs 
    pip3 install --upgrade git+https://github.com/gnuradio/pybombs.git
pybombs auto-config
pybombs recipes add-defaults
pybombs prefix init ~/gnuradio
source ~/gnuradio/setup_env.sh
# Edit ~/.pybombs/recipes/gr-recipes/gnuradio.lwr and add "-DENABLE_CTRLPORT_THRIFT=OFF" in "config_opt"
pybombs install uhd
sudo apt install git cmake g++ libboost-all-dev libgmp-dev \
   swig python3-numpy python3-mako python3-sphinx python3-lxml \
   doxygen libfftw3-dev libcomedi-dev libsdl1.2-dev libgsl-dev \
   libqwt-qt5-dev libqt5opengl5-dev python3-pyqt5 liblog4cpp5-dev \
   libzmq3-dev python3-yaml python3-click python3-click-plugins
pybombs install gnuradio

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