Block taking in message, outputting items

GNU Radio
1

Dear All,

How can I create a block like ‘Random PDU Generator’, but that outputs
items rather than PDUs over a message port?

Hopefully its easy but I am not clear if I need a work function or not,
and if I don’t have one then how do I pass the items out, as one does in
a normal block?

Perhaps there are already blocks that do what I am trying to achieve?

Thanks for your help!!

Regards,

David

David Halls Ph.D.
Research Engineer
Toshiba Research Europe Limited
32 Queen Square, Bristol, BS1 4ND, UK
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2

Hi David,

“items” is a output/input buffer stream term in GNU Radio.
You can just put whatever data type you’d want (ok, a lot of data types)
into PMTs, and send them around; for sample vectors, PMT uniform vectors
are the way to go.
If you just use message passing, you don’t need to implement a
meaningfull work() function – you don’t even have to actually use a
subclass of gr::block (but I recommend doing that for the sake of
getting loads of functionality for free).

Most probably there are blocks that do what you want, maybe you want
something like
random source --> throttle [1] --> message sink?

Greetings,
Marcus

[1] this is one of the very few times I’d recommend using throttle.
Otherwise, the source will just run at maximum speed and roast the
message passing system to a fine crisp.