plutoprimed

plutoprimed is a modified firmware for the PlutoSDR radio transceiver sold by Analog Devices. The modified firmware brings about these two new features:

• The ability to output a frequency sweep pattern which is generated onboard the embedded FPGA chip. See the tx_sweep utility program that can be accessed from command line of the Linux system running on PlutoSDR.

• Faculties that can relate the timing of a signal on an auxiliary digital input port to the sampling of a RF signal. That is, they can tie a transition on the auxiliary port to a particular sample position in the sample stream of the RF signal. See sigmf-writer.py, which is a utility program for creating recordings when triggered by pulse on the auxiliary port. The recordings contain time position of the pulse vis-a-vis the samples recorded.

Building

The modified firmware needs to be build from the submodules in this repository at the particular revisions. Build the FPGA configuration first by recreating a Vivado project from a TCL script (see the last commit in the hdl submodule, this is different from how the FPGA configuration from upstream firmware is built). Then put the resulting bitstream into build/ as build/system_top.bit, and build the remaining parts of the firmware with make build/pluto.frm. The resulting pluto.frm file contains the modified firmware, see also upstream documentation.

Notes on sigmf-writer.py

It can run both on a computer to which PlutoSDR is connected and on the Linux system of the PlutoSDR itself (if it's running the plutoprimed firmware variety).

The script outputs a streamed tar archive with the recordings. Attach tar xv in a pipeline to create local files. (This can be done after transferring the tar archive stream with ssh from PlutoSDR to another host.)

The produced recordings are in the SigMF format (which is a work-in-progress specification).

Final note

Text of the original README from the upstream firmware source repository follows.

plutosdr-fw

PlutoSDR Firmware for the ADALM-PLUTO Active Learning Module

Latest binary Release :

Firmware License : and many others.

Instructions from the Wiki: Building the image

• Build Instructions

 sudo apt-get install git build-essential fakeroot libncurses5-dev libssl-dev ccache
 sudo apt-get install dfu-util u-boot-tools device-tree-compiler libssl1.0-dev mtools
 sudo apt-get install bc python cpio zip unzip rsync file wget
 git clone --recursive https://github.com/analogdevicesinc/plutosdr-fw.git
 cd plutosdr-fw
 export CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabihf-
 export PATH=$PATH:/opt/Xilinx/SDK/2018.2/gnu/aarch32/lin/gcc-arm-linux-gnueabi/bin
 export VIVADO_SETTINGS=/opt/Xilinx/Vivado/2018.2/settings64.sh
 make

The project may build also using Vivado 2017.4, 2017.2, 2016.4 or 2016.2. However 2018.2 is the current tested FPGA systhesis toolchain. In the v0.30 release we swithched to the arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc hard-float toolchain.

If you want to use the former arm-xilinx-linux-gnueabi-gcc soft-float toolchain included in SDK 2017.2. Following variables should be exported:

export CROSS_COMPILE=arm-xilinx-linux-gnueabi-
export PATH=$PATH:/opt/Xilinx/SDK/2017.2/gnu/arm/lin/bin
export VIVADO_SETTINGS=/opt/Xilinx/Vivado/2017.4/settings64.sh

And you need to revert this patch: https://github.com/analogdevicesinc/buildroot/commit/fea212afc7dc0ee530762a1921d9ae8180778ffa

If you receive an error similar to the following:

Starting SDK. This could take few seconds... timeout while establishing a connection with SDK
   while executing
"error "timeout while establishing a connection with SDK""
   (procedure "getsdkchan" line 108)
   invoked from within
"getsdkchan"
   (procedure "createhw" line 26)
   invoked from within
"createhw {*}$args"
   (procedure "::sdk::create_hw_project" line 3)
   invoked from within
"sdk create_hw_project -name hw_0 -hwspec build/system_top.hdf"
   (file "scripts/create_fsbl_project.tcl" line 5)

you may be able to work around it by preventing eclipse from using GTK3 for the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT). Prior to running make, also set the following environment variable:

export SWT_GTK3=0

This problem seems to affect Ubuntu 16.04LTS only.

• Updating your local repository

     git pull
     git submodule update --init --recursive

• Build Artifacts

     michael@HAL9000:~/devel/plutosdr-fw$ ls -AGhl build
   total 55M
   -rw-rw-r-- 1 michael   69 Okt  9 14:24 boot.bif
   -rw-rw-r-- 1 michael 446K Okt  9 14:24 boot.bin
   -rw-rw-r-- 1 michael 446K Okt  9 14:24 boot.dfu
   -rw-rw-r-- 1 michael 575K Okt  9 14:24 boot.frm
   -rw-rw-r-- 1 michael 8,8M Okt  9 14:24 pluto.dfu
   -rw-rw-r-- 1 michael 8,8M Okt  9 14:24 pluto.frm
   -rw-rw-r-- 1 michael   33 Okt  9 14:24 pluto.frm.md5
   -rw-rw-r-- 1 michael 8,8M Okt  9 14:24 pluto.itb
   -rw-rw-r-- 1 michael  17M Okt  9 14:24 plutosdr-fw-v0.23.zip
   -rw-rw-r-- 1 michael 466K Okt  9 14:24 plutosdr-jtag-bootstrap-v0.23.zip
   -rw-r--r-- 1 michael 4,7M Okt  9 14:23 rootfs.cpio.gz
   drwxrwxr-x 6 michael 4,0K Okt  9 14:24 sdk
   -rw-rw-r-- 1 michael 940K Okt  9 14:24 system_top.bit
   -rw-rw-r-- 1 michael 358K Okt  9 14:23 system_top.hdf
   -rwxrwxr-x 1 michael 409K Okt  9 14:24 u-boot.elf
   -rw-rw---- 1 michael 128K Okt  9 14:24 uboot-env.bin
   -rw-rw---- 1 michael 129K Okt  9 14:24 uboot-env.dfu
   -rw-rw-r-- 1 michael 4,6K Okt  9 14:24 uboot-env.txt
   -rwxrwxr-x 1 michael 3,2M Okt  9 14:23 zImage
   -rw-rw-r-- 1 michael  17K Okt  9 14:23 zynq-pluto-sdr.dtb
   -rw-rw-r-- 1 michael  17K Okt  9 14:23 zynq-pluto-sdr-revb.dtb

• Main targets

  File	Comment
  pluto.frm	Main PlutoSDR firmware file used with the USB Mass Storage Device
  pluto.dfu	Main PlutoSDR firmware file used in DFU mode
  boot.frm	First and Second Stage Bootloader (u-boot + fsbl + uEnv) used with the USB Mass Storage Device
  boot.dfu	First and Second Stage Bootloader (u-boot + fsbl) used in DFU mode
  uboot-env.dfu	u-boot default environment used in DFU mode
  plutosdr-fw-vX.XX.zip	ZIP archive containg all of the files above
  plutosdr-jtag-bootstrap-vX.XX.zip	ZIP archive containg u-boot and Vivao TCL used for JATG bootstrapping

• Other intermediate targets

  File	Comment
  boot.bif	Boot Image Format file used to generate the Boot Image
  boot.bin	Final Boot Image
  pluto.frm.md5	md5sum of the pluto.frm file
  pluto.itb	u-boot Flattened Image Tree
  rootfs.cpio.gz	The Root Filesystem archive
  sdk	Vivado/XSDK Build folder including the FSBL
  system_top.bit	FPGA Bitstream (from HDF)
  system_top.hdf	FPGA Hardware Description File exported by Vivado
  u-boot.elf	u-boot ELF Binary
  uboot-env.bin	u-boot default environment in binary format created form uboot-env.txt
  uboot-env.txt	u-boot default environment in human readable text format
  zImage	Compressed Linux Kernel Image
  zynq-pluto-sdr.dtb	Device Tree Blob for Rev.A
  zynq-pluto-sdr-revb.dtb	Device Tree Blob for Rev.B