GSoC 2013 Project Status: Improving the GNU Radio Companion (GRC)

Hi all,

I am Aneela, working on GSoC project Improving the GNU Radio Companion
mentored by Sebastian Koslowski.

Since, we are already half way through summer, I want to share my
progress in project and seek some feedback from community.

Just to remind, my project is divided in different sub-projects. As of
today, I have completed sub-projects 1 and 2 and working on sub project
3.

  1. Documentation access of GNU Radio blocks from within GRC:

    Documentation of GNU Radio blocks (standard + custom) can be
    accessed now from within GRC. If user has Internet connection then he
    can access the documentation from Internet. Feature of accessing local
    copy of documentation is also available in case of unavailability of
    network connection. In summary, an entry has been added in main, context
    and toolbar menu to access the documentation. Moreover, while opening
    the document, GRC console displays the document URI/path address.
    Finally, an error message appears if documentation of selected block is
    not available.

  2. Source code access of GNU Radio blocks from within GRC:

    We can now open the source code (.py and .cc files) of GNU Radio
    blocks from within GRC. For this, an entry has been added in toolbar
    menu to fetch the source code. However, only those users can access the
    source code who have installed the GNU Radio from source. As before, an
    error message appears if source code of selected block is not available
    in the local system.

Below is the ongoing sub project which I plan to finish by the mid term
evaluation.

  1. Creating new custom blocks from within GRC and edit them

    We will build upon gr-modtool to create new custom DSP blocks from
    GRC. Specifically, we will add an entry in toolbar menu that will cause
    a Dialog box to pop up. Then, that Dialog box will ask the user the
    necessary questions (e.g. module name, block name etc.) regarding the
    creation of new block.

Last but not the least, below is the link to my code repo:

I will appreciate any kind of helpful suggestions.

Thanks,
Aneela Yasmeen