Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Call for testers: USRP1 and daughterboard APIupdate

[Johnathan Corgan]

On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 1:48 AM, Per Zetterberg <address@hidden> wrote:

> A question out of curiosity: you write "non-GNU Radio libusrp library". This
> library is built when I download and compile the trunk. Isn't it a part of
> GNU Radio ? Does python applications use this library ?

To clarify, it would have been more accurate to say "non-GNU Radio
framework".  Both the USRP and USRP2 have low-level C++ libraries
(libusrp and libusrp2) which provide the lowest level communications
to the hardware.  These provide a generic read/write API and don't use
the GNU Radio runtime themselves.  Some people have written
applications which only use this interface.

The GNU Radio source and sink blocks for the USRP and USRP2 (in
gr-usrp and gr-usrp2) are wrappers around this low-level interface and
provide the high-level streaming GNU Radio flowgraph semantics for C++
and Python GNU Radio applications.

Currently, much of the auxiliary USRP configuration and all of the
daughterboard handling code is written in Python, and thus can only be
used from Python.  The new API code in cppdb-test rewrites all this in
C++ and puts it in libusrp.  Thus, now C++-only GNU Radio applications
and libusrp-only applications can also use the full range of USRP
functionality.

Our eventual goal is to have 100% of the GNU Radio feature set
available in C++, with the Python API being a pure wrapper around it.
We're nearly there; the USRP daughterboard handling was the largest
chunk of what is left.

-Johnathan