Raspberry Pi’s are inexpensive and the more modern Pi’s are powerful enough to keep up with the level of signal processing on GNURadio associated with Radio Astronomy applications.

• Supported Raspberry Pi Devices
• Installing Ubuntu image with radio astronomy preinstalled on a Raspberry Pi
• Operating system requirement
• Installing Ubuntu on Raspberry Pi
  • Prerequisites
• Post Installation actions:
  • Interacting with the Raspberry Pi
• Installing gr-radio_astro

Supported Raspberry Pi Devices

All devices must have RAM greater than 4GB

1. Raspberry Pi 4 Model B
2. Raspberry Pi 400

Installing Ubuntu image with radio astronomy preinstalled on a Raspberry Pi

This image requires a minimum of 16GB of space on the SD card.

1. Download the image here
2. Unzip the .zip file.
3. Use Raspberry Pi Imager to install this image.
   1. Insert SD card into your card reader on your computer
   2. Open Raspberry Pi imager.
   3. Click Choose OS, and choose Use Custom.
   4. Select the correct image file downloaded in step 1 and 2 from your system.
   5. Click Choose storage and select your inserted SD card.
   6. Click write.
   7. More info here and a video
4. Insert SD card to Raspberry Pi and power it up.
5. The default user name is pi, with password raspberry. Change the password after first boot.

Setting OS and installing software from scratch.

Operating system requirement

1. Ubuntu for Raspberry Pi Click here for more Info

Note: The custom gr-radio_astro software is now only supported for GNURadio 3.8 only. The Raspberry Pi OS by default installs GNURadio 3.7 which is not longer supported.

Installing Ubuntu on Raspberry Pi

Prerequisites

1. Support Raspberry Pi
2. A microSD card (9GB minimum, 16GB recommended)
3. A computer with a microSD card drive
4. A micro USB-C power cable
5. A monitor with an HDMI interface (Optionally for installing Ubuntu Server)
6. A micro HDMI cable (Optionally for installing Ubuntu Server)
7. A USB keyboard and mouse (Optionally for installing Ubuntu Server)

Instructions from Ubuntu to install the OS on the Raspberry Pi 4

NOTE: Firstly, for Ubuntu desktop a monitor and mouse and keyboard is required. If you do not want to access the full desktop interface of ubuntu and only interact via command line interface you can install Ubuntu Server instruction for Ubuntu server installation here. Secondly, Raspberry Pi is built on an ARM based architecture any version of Ubuntu will not work. The OS has to specific to the Pi.

Post OS Installation actions:

Interacting with the Raspberry Pi

1. Using a moniter and mouse and keyboard like any other desktop.
2. Using SSH:
   1. This method can be used on any machine with ssh server enabled.
   2. Install X server on your computer. VcXcrv on windows and XQuartz for macOS.
   3. Power up the Raspberry Pi and connect your computer via ethernet cable
   4. First we need to determine the IP address of the raspberry PI: How to determine Raspberry PI IP address
   5. If the determined IP address is <IP address> then in the terminal type ssh -Y pi@<IP address>
   6. More info on SSH here
3. Using PuTTy on Windows:
   1. Download PuTTy.
   2. Add IP address in the hostname field.
4. Using VNC: More info here

Installing gr-radio_astro: Installing gr-radio_astro

Notes: run volk_profile after installing everything to make sure GNURadio is optimized to work on your device.

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