Ettus Research News

GNU Radio
1

Ettus R. LLC was founded in 2004 to produce high quality, low cost
software radio systems, and bring these capabilities to everyone. In
the last five and a half years this company, which started in a garage,
has shipped thousands of products to users in over 67 countries. Those
products have been used for everything from mapping the earth, moon and
stars to tracking wildlife, from teaching signal processing to obtaining
a PhD., by everyone from individual hobbyists to huge research teams,
for communicating across a desk, under water, under ground, across town,
and around the world.

Today, as the next step in the growth of our company, we are very proud
to announce that Ettus R. has been acquired by National
Instruments Corporation (NI, http://www.ni.com). NI was founded in 1976
to transform the way engineers and scientists around the world design,
prototype, and deploy systems for test, control, and embedded design
applications.

Below you will find answers to some questions you may have about this
change.

What does this mean for Ettus R. LLC and its products?

For the most part, things will stay the same. We will continue to
operate separately from, but as a wholly-owned subsidiary of National
Instruments. Our web address, email, phone, and postal addresses will
all stay the same. All sales will continue to be direct. The
additional resources the acquisition provides us will help us to serve
you better and faster.

The USRP family of hardware for software radio will continue to be our
main product line, and it will continue to be actively developed and
improved. We have several exciting new products we are working on for
release later this year. We are also working on a new “Universal
Hardware Driver” or UHD, which will completely encapsulate everything
needed to control all of our hardware in a single driver. This will
enable software developers to use USRP hardware without having to worry
about the low level details of daughterboard control, kernel drivers, or
other factors. The UHD will be cross-platform, allowing use on Linux,
Windows, and Mac OS X.

What does this mean for GNU Radio?

Ettus R. will continue to support and contribute to GNU Radio,
and the combination of GNU Radio software and USRP hardware will remain
our core focus. The additional resources that a large company like NI
can provide will allow us to focus even more energy on improving the
overall capabilities of the system. Two of the core GNU Radio
developers, Matt E. and Josh B., are employed by Ettus R…

In the future we will also likely be providing GNU Radio drivers for
additional hardware from National Instruments.

What does this mean for LabVIEW?

The Universal Hardware Driver will allow us to produce high-quality,
officially supported LabVIEW drivers for all of our hardware. We hope
to have those drivers available in the coming months.

What does this mean for those using Simulink, OSSIE, OpenBTS, SCARI, or
other software with their USRP hardware?

Ettus R. is fully committed to enabling the use of USRP hardware
with any and every software platform for SDR. The UHD will ease both
the technical and the licensing hurdles which have made this somewhat
difficult in the past. We will be actively seeking input from the key
representatives of those communities in order to ensure that the UHD API
will fulfill their needs.

Will USRP hardware be sold through National Instruments?

In the short term, no, all sales will continue to be directly through
Ettus R., but in the longer term we may offer some or all products
through NI’s worldwide sales network as well.

In summary, we will continue to bring you high quality, low cost devices
for software radio systems, to enable you, our users, to create
exciting, groundbreaking radio communication systems.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask. Thank you for
your time and your support.

Matt E.
President, Ettus R. LLC
[email protected]

2

Congrats all at Ettus research! Looking forward to the future.

Tim

3

I have questions about the UHD. What license will be applied to it?
Will
the sources be provided or binary only? (I suspect sources, but want to
be
sure) And will the UHD be taking the place of libusrp2.so?

Also, more general, from the perspective of the user (me) what will
change?
From the announcement it seems that not much will change for the user.

Thanks for your help and congratulations,
Devin

4

On 02/05/2010 12:31 PM, devin kelly wrote:

I have questions about the UHD. What license will be applied to it?
Will the sources be provided or binary only? (I suspect sources, but
want to be sure) And will the UHD be taking the place of libusrp2.so?

The UHD code will ALL be open source. In ADDITION to GPL it will ALSO
be available under a license which allows it to be linked into non-GPL
and/or closed source applications like LabVIEW and Simulink. This is
commonly known as dual-licensing. We still need to work out the exact
wording of this license.

And yes, it would supersede libusrp2.so.

Also, more general, from the perspective of the user (me) what will
change? From the announcement it seems that not much will change for
the user.

Users will not notice anything different. We are still committed to the
same core values of open source and open standards we have always had.

Matt

5

So I guess I should be the first one to ask:

How will this affect the GPL and Open Sourceness of the USRP project?

6

Congratulations to Ettus. Hope to see more and more nice productions

Matt E. wrote:

for communicating across a desk, under water, under ground, across town,
change.

additional hardware from National Instruments.
other software with their USRP hardware?

your time and your support.
[email protected]
http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnuradio

–
View this message in context:
http://old.nabble.com/Ettus-Research-News-tp27471234p27475728.html
Sent from the GnuRadio mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

7

Hi,

I want to share my 2 cents:

  1. Congratulation Matt.

  2. Matt (and Ettus R.) has gave much to SDR open source community
    and deserve more funding.

  3. May be things (for gnuradio community) will not be as it was before
    NI announcement, but one should not be selfish and let others who served
    (and still serving) the humanity with this great project (Eric,
    Johnathan, Matt, Josh, Tom, etc) to take little financial benefits
    from their work.

  4. We should be very grateful for them for sharing their knowledge with
    us and providing a low cost educational and business hardware/software
    platforms.

  5. This is natural business development and I support the one who says
    that the resistance to this movement reveals a secret agenda.

  6. I agree with the one who says it is business, but with my respect to
    him we do this business (in open source community) with friendship, fun
    and pleasure.

Dear Matt,

What is important to us is to keep providing the SDR hardware at lowest
possible prices and keep developing your products. Congratulation again.

Best Regards,

Firas A.

8

Heh… You know I wondered the exact same thing a few weeks ago. Matt
“informed” me that the .PCB files were never released. I did find a
copy of
the gEDA files used to make the schematic drawings for the USRP from a
older
GNURadio mirror. So much of what I’m seeing from Matt has been a move
away
from Open Source and more towards “Closed Development”.

I love how the USRP brochure has this blurb:

“Open Source Community
The entire USRP design is open source, including schematics,
firmware, drivers, and even the FPGA and daughterboard
designs. When combined with the open source GNU Radio
software, you get a completely open software radio system
enabling host-based signal processing on commodity platforms.
No software or licenses need to be purchased.”

While to the letter of the law he did provide the above details, he
has/will
not provide all the information/engineering drawings necessary for
people to
roll their own boards or to import existing designs so they can be
modified
to suit a person’s/organization’s project. I can understand why being
this
is how he makes a living, but at the same time he shouldn’t be promoting
the
design as open source… just open architecture-ish…

On the other hand, the HPSDR is completely open.

9

On Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 3:20 PM, Don F. [email protected] wrote:

firmware, drivers, and even the FPGA and daughterboard
design as open source… just open architecture-ish…
I never do this, but:

You have no idea what you are talking about. Please be better informed
before libeling a real champion of open source software and hardware
and who has done so much for the software radio community as a whole.
On a personal level, he’s also a very good friend.

I will let Matt answer your specific issues, but I find your tone to
be insulting and your comments baseless. This is not the kind of
community we have been fostering here.

Tom

10

Don F. wrote:

So I guess I should be the first one to ask:

How will this affect the GPL and Open Sourceness of the USRP project?

More specifically, I see the pdfs of the schematics [1], but is there
location to pull the .sch and .pcb files (or proprietary format
equivalents) from? I checked the gnuradio src tree [2], no luck…

thx,

Jason.

[1] http://code.ettus.com/redmine/ettus/projects/public/documents
[2] http://gnuradio.org/redmine/repositories/show/gnuradio

11

Don,

If anyone out there that is actually a part of this community feels the
way you do, I’d love to hear it. But you just showed up and started
making accusations. I’ve been contributing to GNU Radio for nine years
now. I’ll answer your questions for the sake of everyone else, though.

On 02/05/2010 01:20 PM, Don F. wrote:

Heh… You know I wondered the exact same thing a few weeks ago. Matt
“informed” me that the .PCB files were never released. I did find a
copy of the gEDA files used to make the schematic drawings for the USRP
from a older GNURadio mirror. So much of what I’m seeing from Matt has
been a move away from Open Source and more towards “Closed Development”.

This is nothing new. The .PCB files for the USRP1 and USRP2 were never
released. This has been openly discussed on this mailing list in the
past, and you are the first to express any real problem with it.
Besides, the .PCB files are all in PADS format, and licenses to that
program cost tens of thousands of dollars.

As for the .sch files, we have moved our source control, our hosting,
and our website, and been moving to a new build system all at the same
time. We’ve also been trying to clean up these (sometimes very old)
schematics to make them work with the current gEDA tools.

Also, we’ve had a number of people build their own copies of our
hardware, and when they don’t work, try to get us to replace them by
lying and saying they bought it from us.

So I hope you can excuse us for not rushing to get schematic files to
someone who has never paid us anything more than insults.

I love how the USRP brochure has this blurb:

“Open Source Community
The entire USRP design is open source, including schematics,
firmware, drivers, and even the FPGA and daughterboard
designs. When combined with the open source GNU Radio
software, you get a completely open software radio system
enabling host-based signal processing on commodity platforms.
No software or licenses need to be purchased.”

Not a word in that is, was, or will be false.

While to the letter of the law he did provide the above details, he
has/will not provide all the information/engineering drawings necessary
for people to roll their own boards or to import existing designs so
they can be modified to suit a person’s/organization’s project. I can
understand why being this is how he makes a living, but at the same time
he shouldn’t be promoting the design as open source… just open
architecture-ish…

On the other hand, the HPSDR is completely open.

You are fully welcome to use an HPSDR product. You’ll find that in
addition to a lot of work of their own, they use a bunch of firmware and
FPGA code that we wrote.

Matt

12

Am I denying that he shouldn’t be paid? No.
He has done a great bit of work and much congratulations to him for
taking
his business to the “next level”.

I’m not going to get all “awestruck” about the guy. No one is worthy of
that. He may be your friend, but this is just business. Nothing
personal.

When someone touts a product that doesn’t include all the pieces, then
they
should be given a chance to respond and make it right.

As for my tone: Matt started it. :slight_smile:

I kinda felt something like this was happening when wouldn’t repost the
hardware designs back into the SVN. Apparently, I was right to be
concerned
as should anyone involved with the project.

13

NI has a reputation for fiercely protecting their patents. They sued
The MathWorks
over Simulink in a lengthy and hard-fought case and won in a jury trial
in 2003.
This is why, to this day, you can’t change source block parameters via
dialog box or
other visual or “control panel” means while a simulation is running in
Simulink.
After that court decision, NI used litigation (or the threat of it) to
subdue (or
acquire) certain program vendors with block diagram style
user-interfaces.

My guess is that at some future point, new additions to Ettus radio will
be offered
under some type of business-oriented licensing model that ensures a
software revenue
stream for NI (in addition to the radio hardware). That has been NI’s
model; in
following this company since the mid-1980s, I don’t see it changing.

-Jeff

14

Don-

I’m not going to get all “awestruck” about the guy. No one is worthy of that. He
may be your friend, but this is just business. Nothing personal.

After seeing 100s of engineers and projects and companies go by in my 30
years of
engineering, I can say you probably ought to be awestruck by Matt E…
He’s that
good. Through creativity, clear thinking and hard work, he’s created
something
extremely valuable to humanity, used by 1000s of developers.

On the other hand, I sure hope Matt did his homework on NI and added
appropriate
conditions in the acquisition agreement.

-Jeff

15

On Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 2:01 PM, Matt E. [email protected] wrote:

Don,

If anyone out there that is actually a part of this community feels the way
you do, I’d love to hear it. But you just showed up and started making
accusations. I’ve been contributing to GNU Radio for nine years now. I’ll
answer your questions for the sake of everyone else, though.

Matt,

Your work is very commendable in regards to GNU Radio and you deserve
your
accolades as well as your new success with NI where I wish you even more
success. The questions I’ve had for you have been purely business and
nothing personal so if you feel that the questions I’ve asked are
accusations, then please accept my humble apologies as to the intent.

My goal here is to further the longevity of any open source project by
making sure the knowledge and IP is there for future generations. It is
all
too often that a company such as Ettus LLC will change or do something
that
is contradictory to the open source movement thusly creating a
“landlocked”
community. For instance a certain radio company that advertises a piece
of
equipment with a “open standard” however uses proprietary vocodecs.

This is nothing new. The .PCB files for the USRP1 and USRP2 were never
released. This has been openly discussed on this mailing list in the past,
and you are the first to express any real problem with it. Besides, the .PCB
files are all in PADS format, and licenses to that program cost tens of
thousands of dollars.

First, this was in reply to someone else’s question. And yes, you did
inform me of the .PCB’s never being released a few weeks ago. Do I have
a
problem with it? Yes and no. Yes, because you didn’t even bother
converting them to PCB or even just releasing the PADS files and letting
the
“teeming millions” convert them for the project. And no, because I
understand it’s your IP that you’re giving to the community.

As for the .sch files, we have moved our source control, our hosting, and
our website, and been moving to a new build system all at the same time.
We’ve also been trying to clean up these (sometimes very old) schematics to
make them work with the current gEDA tools.

Again understandable. However very surprised (like others) that the
hardware directory was gone. It took a little googling to find a old
mirror
that was still online.

Also, we’ve had a number of people build their own copies of our hardware,
and when they don’t work, try to get us to replace them by lying and saying
they bought it from us.

That’s down right douchebaggery right there and I can understand not
supporting a product you didn’t build. But I’m sure you have ways of
identifying a board built by Ettus and a board build by someone else.

So I hope you can excuse us for not rushing to get schematic files to
someone who has never paid us anything more than insults.

Again, no insults. Just appeared you were dropping off the face of the
planet with your announcement and taking the USRP with you. Again, I’ve
iterated that it’s your right to do so since you own the copyright. But
if
you had done that move, you would have given a good slap to the open
source
community. As for your new ventures, there’s no telling what they will
ask
of you since I’m assuming they bought the rights to the USRP and whether
or
not it remains in open source. Anything to the future would be
speculation
for which I did speculate to the worse case.

No software or licenses need to be purchased."

Not a word in that is, was, or will be false.

That part was not clear in your press release as to how it will affect
the
USRP and future driver development. And I think it should be clarified
for
the general public in how this will work out to the community.

16

Hello,

Hm, I discoverd it is like Free as in freedom not like free beer. :frowning:

2010/2/5 Tom R. [email protected]

17

Today, as the next step in the growth of our company, we are very proud to
announce that Ettus R. has been acquired by National Instruments
Corporation (NI, http://www.ni.com). NI was founded in 1976 to transform
the way engineers and scientists around the world design, prototype, and
deploy systems for test, control, and embedded design applications.

This is scary, but there are also some possibilities involved here
too. This will give Matt more resources, which can benefit us if used
correctly. And I guess nobody can turn down the possibility of making
a couple of million bucks.

I have always told NI people (including the local CEO) that their
software and hardware sucks, because it is expensive, restrictive and
runs well only on windows. We have bought hardware from NI for over
ten times the price of a USRP and we still use USRP because it simply
works better for us in terms flexibility and ease of use.

Here is my wish list:

  1. Maintain hackability of the hardware, keep the schematics open. And
    please, don’t require proprietary rack mounting connectors.
  2. Try to maintain the community.
  3. And please, don’t require me to find my latest NI update cds and
    serial numbers for my labview. I have no idea where they are.
  4. Matt, please don’t turn into a NI sales droid, at least not for
    another 10-20 years.

juha

18

Forget to mention:
I have found an invitation paper from NI in my Mailbox today about some
NI
product presentation.
So would be great if I find sometime a NI invitation about a GNURADIO
presentation in my area. :slight_smile:

yours faithful
Josef V.

19

On 02/05/2010 04:59 PM, Don F. wrote:

Am I denying that he shouldn’t be paid? No.
He has done a great bit of work and much congratulations to him for
taking his business to the “next level”.

I’m not going to get all “awestruck” about the guy. No one is worthy
of that. He may be your friend, but this is just business. Nothing
personal.

When someone touts a product that doesn’t include all the pieces, then
they should be given a chance to respond and make it right.
So, near as I can tell, the “missing piece” that you’re all bothered
about is that the PCB design
files were never released, and this, somehow, makes the product “not
include all the pieces”.
Last time I bought an LCD TV, for example, I didn’t even get
printed-on-paper schematics, let
alone electronic design files. Matt could have chosen to not give
away any of the hardware
design information in an e-useful format, and he’d still be a
towering member of the Open
Source community. There is no “code” that says that “if you give away
any of it, you have to
give away all of it”.

Not only is all the firmware, fpga designs, software (via gnu radio),
available openly, but so are
other “manufacturing” files like the BOMs, and schematic-capture
files.

Matt, as the owner of this stuff in the intellectual sense, has chosen
to hold-back a rather-small
piece of the pie–that’s his choice, and he’s been very public about
that choice from the very
early days–and I’ve been around since the very beginning so I think
I’m speaking with at least
some authority on the subject. I have a USRP1 with a very low serial
number, and I was one
of the BETA customers for the DBS_RX, and even in those days, the
policy was that the PCB
files were held back.

Seems to me that the only people really affected by such a decision are
those who want to put
zero effort into exact-cloning his work. If the real reason is
that you want to “integrate pieces of
the design into your own product”, then everything you need is
already openly available.
Implying otherwise is disingenuous in the extreme.

Currently, there’s a “glitch” in that websites got shuffled and Matt
chose to take that opportunity
to clean things up before putting all of that stuff back up. I think
it really sucks that you’re
effectively accusing Matt of having a hidden agenda. Perhaps, I might
suggest, Don, that maybe
you’re the one with the hidden agenda.

Some peoples children…

20

Marcus D. Leech wrote:

When someone touts a product that doesn’t include all the pieces, then
they should be given a chance to respond and make it right.

So, near as I can tell, the “missing piece” that you’re all bothered
about is that the PCB design
files were never released, and this, somehow, makes the product “not
include all the pieces”.

I’m sure there are a few other files such as a true schematic so that
the PCB layout could be reconfigured to meet a different form factor.
But no worries, we all know that in open source: “Some assembly is
required…”

You’re right. And lauds to him. But don’t blame me if you chose to buy
a LCD TV without schematics. Any true hacker worth their salt I’m sure
could find a TV with such details. And you probably didn’t get the SAMS
manual with your TV… that costs extra. :slight_smile:

Not only is all the firmware, fpga designs, software (via gnu radio),
available openly, but so are
other “manufacturing” files like the BOMs, and schematic-capture files.

Which the USRP2 is missing… at least with my checkout of the SVN I
found… But to give him the benefit of the doubt, he did say he’s
cleaning it up and re-releasing the BOM’s so I’ll just be patient unless
NI takes control of the information.

files were held back.

Good for you to support the project at an early stage. But what happens
when your project won’t fit into the square form factor? What if you
have this great idea but can only fit into the form factor of say a cell
phone… then what? I’m not the only one with the same idea… Look at
the beagleboard guys doing their USRP work.

Seems to me that the only people really affected by such a decision are
those who want to put
zero effort into exact-cloning his work. If the real reason is
that you want to “integrate pieces of
the design into your own product”, then everything you need is
already openly available.
Implying otherwise is disingenuous in the extreme.

Umm… plagiarism has been said to be the greatest form of flattery…
but no, having the files helps expand a device’s potential… an
example would be a USRP2 with 4 ports instead of two on one board.
And if this were really true, wouldn’t you think some board manufacture
in asia would be flooding the market with USRP knockoffs? I think you
give too much credit to being a early pioneer and having all the arrows
in your back…

Currently, there’s a “glitch” in that websites got shuffled and Matt
chose to take that opportunity
to clean things up before putting all of that stuff back up. I think
it really sucks that you’re
effectively accusing Matt of having a hidden agenda. Perhaps, I might
suggest, Don, that maybe
you’re the one with the hidden agenda.

WTF? Doesn’t anyone backup files? Or leave the old site up while they
migrate the information? That’s IT 101 there…

Some peoples children…

I give Matt major props for developing the hardware, I really do… The
rest of you are just appliance users.