Native Interface between MATLAB/Simulink and USRP available

GNU Radio
1

Hello everyone,

we are proud to be able to announce the immediate availability of a
native interface between the USRP1 and Simulink. It has been developed
during the last seven months at the “Institute für Nachrichtentechnik”,
University of Karlsruhe, Germany. Like the GNU Radio project, the
Simulink-USRP interface is of course released under an Open Source
Software License, namely the GNU GPL 3.0.

Simulink-USRP uses the library libusrp from GNU Radio. However, a lot of
effort has gone into reducing the dependencies to external programs,
such as boost etc. Being a native Win32 project, no installation of
Cygwin or MinGW is required. Therefore, installing Simulink-USRP is an
easy four-step process:
1.) Installing the libusb-win32 driver (if not done already anyway). A
pre-packaged zip archive is available from our downloads section.
2.) Selecting the correct compiler in MATLAB.
3.) Downloading the simulink-usrp package and adding it to the MATLAB
path.
4.) Compiling the package by issuing one single command at the MATLAB
command prompt.

By using the Simulink-USRP interface, one is able to stream data
directly from the USRP into a Simulink simulation in real time, and vice
versa. Many properties of the USRP are controlled through the parameters
of the provided Simulink blocks.

To find out more about the features of this package, to view
screenshots, read installation instructions and frequently anticipated
questions, and finally to find a download link, please visit
http://www.int.uni-karlsruhe.de/english/995.php.

We hope that this will be useful to those of you who want to build
signal processing applications directly in Simulink.

Enno Klasing
Stefan Nagel

2

Hello Enno,

Great work!

Did you test this with Linux? Are there any plans to support Linux/GCC
etc.?

Best regards
Dominik

3

Hello Dominik,

Dominik A. schrieb:

Did you test this with Linux? Are there any plans to support Linux/GCC
etc.?

Nope, we have not done anything on Linux with this interface.

If somebody wants to maintain a Linux-Version of simulink-usrp, we could
add this as a project on e.g. SourceForge (see below). So if anybody is
interested in porting this to Linux and maintaining the Linux-specific
parts, please let us know.

Enno

P.S.:
A short remark about why we are not adding this to CGRAN (which was
proposed in one mail we received): since simulink-usrp does not have to
do too much with GNU Radio (except for using libusrp, of course) we feel
that it would be inappropriate to use CGRAN for hosting of this project.
I think that CGRAN should be left for “real” GNU Radio applications.

4

Hi Enno,

If somebody wants to maintain a Linux-Version of simulink-usrp, we could
add this as a project on e.g. SourceForge (see below). So if anybody is
interested in porting this to Linux and maintaining the Linux-specific
parts, please let us know.
I already ported it to linux today, however don’t want to maintain it.
The main change was to use a Makefile (which ideally will be generated
by Automake, but isn’t till now) and to note that matlab under linux
passes strings as characters, not wide characters (to whatever reason).
There were a few M$-specific code parts, too. Though no big change was
necessary.

Thanks for the great program!

Dominik