At yesterday's meeting, Jon Jacky gave an overview of GNU Radio and brought a signal-board kit for demonstration. I'm not an engineer so I can only explain it roughly. The basic purpose of GNU radio is to run a radio receiver or transmitter, but many people use it to experiment with signal processing, or modifying a radio signal. The kit is a box containing a circuit board and pluggable daughterboards, with I/O ports and a USB port, A/D and D/A converters, etc. The whole kit costs $600, which sounds expensive compared to a netbook, but is cheap compared to commercial counterparts costing $100,000. Jon described his scientific experiment, which is capturing the surface properties of something very small (?). He demonstrated GNU Radio running, connected to the kit which was acting like an antenna-less receiver (picking up electrical noise in the kit). GNU Radio has a lot of C++ dependencies but there are packages for all of it in Ubuntu. Windows and Mac users have the usual difficulties installing it. The top level is a Python layer, with a wxPython GUI and a library for controlling the kit and software processors.
A processor modifies the radio signal in various ways; there are some hundred processors that ship with GNU Radio, and the daughterboards in the kit contain others in hardware. You can also program the chips in the kit using a compiled language whose name I don't remember. GNU Radio includes the compiler and a simulator, so you can test your designs without hardware. Radio kits are used to prototype consumer devices like cell phones, but the kit is much more expensive than mass-production hardware because it's fully programmable. GNU Radio includes the schematics to build your own kit, but most people buy one premade. There were seven people total including two long-distance members. Chris came from Olympia, and Melissa from Stanwood. They both know a lot about signal processing but I think neither works in it. There will be no meetings in July and August due to our hosts' schedules. The next meeting is September 9th at Office Nomads. If somebody wants to arrange informal meetings in a restaurant or bar over the summer, we can do that. I had suggested setting up a jobs page on the wiki but I see now there is already one. http://seapig.org/JobsPage John (not Jacky) has volunteered to clean it up and make a bigger link on the home page. One thing we need to do is have submitters date all listings so we know which ones are old. We discussed the format and rules for the page. I suggested a top section for jobs offered, a middle section for jobs wanted, and a bottom section for consultants (ongoing services available). We decided not to officially limit the listings to Python jobs. I think anything a SeaPIG member needs should be allowed, and I doubt we'll get dozens of C++ listings crowding out the Python ones. The UW Extension will have a year-long course on Python coming up. John Jacky will teach the first part on basic Python programming. Brian Dorsey will teach the second part on Internet programming. Extension courses do not give college credit but they give skills, and if nobody else recognizes Pythonology certificates, at least SeaPIG will. :) -- Mike Orr <[email protected]>
