The Universal Hardware Driver (UHD) working!

Just a quick note that I have successfully installed the Universal Hardware Driver (UHD) for the USRP. The UHD is the next generation hardware driver for the USRP family hardware from Ettus Research and it provides better hardware abstraction and portability as the current drivers.

I already tried to make the switch few weeks ago without success – well, it built fine but without USRP1 support. Now I have realized that it was because I was missing the libusb-1.0 libraries (my current drivers use the old libusb-0.1). After installing the libusb-1.0 devpack it compiled fine including the USRP1 support. Both uhd_find_devices and uhd_usrp_probe detected my USRP1 and the daughterboards that I have currently mounted. I did not have much time to play around with it but it was fun to try the ASCII art spectrum analyzer example that is included with the UHD.

Before you laugh think about how useful this can be over an SSH connection to a remote site 🙂

Switching to GNU Radio next branch was also painless once UHD was installed and in the path. Again, no test runs but GRC comes up with the UHD block. Now on to porting my applications adding UHD support…