Release Announcement: GNU Radio 4.1

GNU Radio
1

Hey everyone,

as you might have heard, a GNU Radio hackfest is going on in sunny
California, and one thing we’ve gotten going is the 4.1 release for GNU
Radio. As you can tell, this is a major version jump.

Here’s a release summary:

Move to .NET: This is probably the biggest change for now. Because of
our continuing troubles with SWIG, we decided to move to a different
platform for interoperating between a high-performance language and an
easy scripting language, and .NET serves this cause. So, anything
previously written in C++ is now in C#, and for the simple stuff
(previously Python blocks) we now use ASP.NET. This is also fantastic as
it finally allows graphical development using Visual Basic.

This also allowed us to modify the block API. The downside is, all OOT
modules will be incompatible with GR4 – maybe gr_modtool will provide
conversion utilities once it has been ported to Delphi.

Linux support is currently not available – this is not ideal, but we
figured the 3.x series had broken Windows support for a long time, so
this simply moves the problem to a different operating system.
Unfortunately, we can’t provide liveSDR ISOs anymore, now, because of
licensing issues. As soon as mono picks up the slack, we’ll be able to
port GNU Radio 4 to Mono and Linux support will be mostly back on track.

Embedded Support: As a result of the embedded Linux conference the
week prior to the hackfest, we realized that this whole ‘embedded’ thing
is just a fad and is eating up our development resources. We are thus
dropping embedded platform support for now, although we might revisit
this when embedded Windows becomes more popular.

GNU Radio Companion: To overcome the lack of volunteers developing
GRC, we will be integrating our graphical development process into the
.NET framework also. As mentioned before, Visual Basic is ideally suited
for the development of graphical widgets and we’re anticipating a surge
in new graphical widgets from the community.

On the community side, there’ll be a couple of changes, too: Some
already guessed we’d be dropping the mailing list as a communications
platform when we announced our endorsement of Stack Overflow. The
mailing list will go down as soon as we have a new web-based forum
available, where users can post images inline as well as use Emojis. To
avoid excessive trolling, users will either need a Facebook or Paypal
account to log in.

Thanks everyone for being part of this community and keeping it going!
Of course, all the new stuff can be found on the 4.1 release website:

http://gnuradio.org/redmine/projects/gnuradio/wiki/Release4

Cheers,
Martin

2

I totally agree

On 01/04/15 21:34, Anderson, Douglas J. wrote:

as you might have heard, a GNU Radio hackfest is going on in sunny
(previously Python blocks) we now use ASP.NET. This is also fantastic as
licensing issues. As soon as mono picks up the slack, we’ll be able to
.NET framework also. As mentioned before, Visual Basic is ideally suited

[email protected]
Discuss-gnuradio Info Page

Discuss-gnuradio mailing list
[email protected]
Discuss-gnuradio Info Page

–

Universitt Bern
Institut fr Informatik und angewandte Mathematik
Communication and Distributed Systems Research Group

Marcel Stolz, BSc
Master Student

Neubrckstrasse 10
CH-3012 Bern
mailto:[email protected]

3

I just threw up in my mouth a little…

From: discuss-gnuradio-bounces+danderson=removed_email_address@domain.invalid
[discuss-gnuradio-bounces+danderson=removed_email_address@domain.invalid] on behalf
of Martin B. [[email protected]]
Sent: Wednesday, April 01, 2015 1:30 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Discuss-gnuradio] Release Announcement: GNU Radio 4.1

Hey everyone,

as you might have heard, a GNU Radio hackfest is going on in sunny
California, and one thing we’ve gotten going is the 4.1 release for GNU
Radio. As you can tell, this is a major version jump.

Here’s a release summary:

Move to .NET: This is probably the biggest change for now. Because of
our continuing troubles with SWIG, we decided to move to a different
platform for interoperating between a high-performance language and an
easy scripting language, and .NET serves this cause. So, anything
previously written in C++ is now in C#, and for the simple stuff
(previously Python blocks) we now use ASP.NET. This is also fantastic as
it finally allows graphical development using Visual Basic.

This also allowed us to modify the block API. The downside is, all OOT
modules will be incompatible with GR4 – maybe gr_modtool will provide
conversion utilities once it has been ported to Delphi.

Linux support is currently not available – this is not ideal, but we
figured the 3.x series had broken Windows support for a long time, so
this simply moves the problem to a different operating system.
Unfortunately, we can’t provide liveSDR ISOs anymore, now, because of
licensing issues. As soon as mono picks up the slack, we’ll be able to
port GNU Radio 4 to Mono and Linux support will be mostly back on track.

Embedded Support: As a result of the embedded Linux conference the
week prior to the hackfest, we realized that this whole ‘embedded’ thing
is just a fad and is eating up our development resources. We are thus
dropping embedded platform support for now, although we might revisit
this when embedded Windows becomes more popular.

GNU Radio Companion: To overcome the lack of volunteers developing
GRC, we will be integrating our graphical development process into the
.NET framework also. As mentioned before, Visual Basic is ideally suited
for the development of graphical widgets and we’re anticipating a surge
in new graphical widgets from the community.

On the community side, there’ll be a couple of changes, too: Some
already guessed we’d be dropping the mailing list as a communications
platform when we announced our endorsement of Stack Overflow. The
mailing list will go down as soon as we have a new web-based forum
available, where users can post images inline as well as use Emojis. To
avoid excessive trolling, users will either need a Facebook or Paypal
account to log in.

Thanks everyone for being part of this community and keeping it going!
Of course, all the new stuff can be found on the 4.1 release website:

http://gnuradio.org/redmine/projects/gnuradio/wiki/Release4

Cheers,
Martin

Discuss-gnuradio mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnuradio

4

On 04/01/2015 03:30 PM, Martin B. wrote:

different platform for interoperating between a high-performance
Linux support is currently not available – this is not ideal, but we
revisit this when embedded Windows becomes more popular.
mailing list will go down as soon as we have a new web-based forum
Martin

You know, there’s a tradition about April 1, that jokes played after
13:00 local cause bad kharma to flow to the joker. Just, you know,
sayin’.

5

On 01.04.2015 12:40, Marcus D. Leech wrote:

You know, there’s a tradition about April 1, that jokes played after
13:00 local cause bad kharma to flow to the joker. Just, you know,
sayin’.

You underestimate my West-ness of timezone.

M

6

On Wed, Apr 1, 2015 at 12:30 PM, Martin B. [email protected]
wrote:

Unfortunately, we can’t provide liveSDR ISOs anymore, now, because of
licensing issues.

Rest assured we are almost ready to announce our GNU Radio Live SDR
Floppy
Disk Environment and parallel port license dongle.

7

Hi Martin,

thanks for wrapping up the news!
Just to add a bit from the developers/infrastructural side of things:
From the infrastructure side of things, we’ve agreed to migrate to our
own SharePoint server, and ditch git. It had terrible Perforce support,
and isn’t really suited for VisualStudio projects. Also, it was really
more complex that it should have been. Obviously, that breaks pybombs
and build-gnuradio, but we should soon be seeing GR on the Windows 8/10
App Store.

I’ve spent the profits from last GRCON on the StackOverflow sponsoring
and Facebook adverising. You will be seeing the new GR4 logo next to
questions tagged with gnu-radio and software-defined-radio starting next
monday, and people with related interests (hams, .Net devs, or
GR-connected FB account) will see ads in their FB timeline soon, too;
the idea is that the revenue that we can generate by placing
successively more ads on gnuradio.org will quickly cover our FB
expenses, and will also give the project a touch of professionalism that
basically made all but academic lunatics stay away from GR.

Enjoy the ride,
Marcus

8

On 04/01/2015 03:43 PM, Martin B. wrote:

On 01.04.2015 12:40, Marcus D. Leech wrote:

You know, there’s a tradition about April 1, that jokes played after
13:00 local cause bad kharma to flow to the joker. Just, you know,
sayin’.

You underestimate my West-ness of timezone.

M

The Internet screwed up everything… :slight_smile:

9

Please tell me the SharePoint server has no backups, and is running off
a
56K modem running on GNURadio in somebody’s grandmother’s basement…

Michael

On Wed, Apr 1, 2015 at 12:48 PM, Marcus Müller
[email protected]

10

In the interest of saving the GR support team costly web hosting fees,
may I send a self-addressed package with my blank 3.5" floppies to get
the release?
How many blank floppies should I send? I think I can get them in bulk on
eBay.
I’m in no hurry, so return by pre-paid surface mail is fine for me (it
will take me time to convert my C++ GR blocks to C#).

  • Tim
11

It’s just not fair to keep reminding me that today’s 1 APR. It’s been
too
busy to sort out the cruft from the rest of it all.

On Wed, Apr 1, 2015 at 2:40 PM, Marcus D. Leech [email protected]
wrote:

Move to .NET: This is probably the biggest change for now. Because of

embedded platform support for now, although we might revisit this when
we announced our endorsement of Stack Overflow. The mailing list will go
Martin
Discuss-gnuradio mailing list
[email protected]
Discuss-gnuradio Info Page

–
Gerry Creager
NSSL/CIMMS
405.325.6371
++++++++++++++++++++++
“Big whorls have little whorls,
That feed on their velocity;
And little whorls have lesser whorls,
And so on to viscosity.”
Lewis Fry Richardson (1881-1953)

12

This was a good April fools post, mainly because I forgot it was April
1st
and believed it. Thank you for getting the juices flowing!

Rich

On Wed, Apr 1, 2015 at 12:55 PM, Monahan-Mitchell, Tim <

13

I liked the one with porting to .Net especially that the previous day I
got a presentation on a conference with how open source is .Net and how
open MS is now :slight_smile:

Bogdan

 On Wednesday, April 1, 2015 10:56 PM, "Monahan-Mitchell, Tim"

[email protected] wrote:

In the interest of saving the GR support team costly web hosting fees,
may I send a self-addressed package with my blank 3.5" floppies to get
the release?
How many blank floppies should I send? I think I can get them in bulk on
eBay.
I’m in no hurry, so return by pre-paid surface mail is fine for me (it
will take me time to convert my C++ GR blocks to C#).

  • Tim
14

My blood pressure spiked for the first sentence and a half! (then I
remembered the date)

@(^.^)@ Ed

15

On 01.04.2015 13:15, Ed Criscuolo wrote:

My blood pressure spiked for the first sentence and a half! (then I
remembered the date)

I was assuming the version number would be a clue, too :slight_smile:

M

16

On 04/01/2015 03:55 PM, Monahan-Mitchell, Tim wrote:

In the interest of saving the GR support team costly web hosting fees, may I
send a self-addressed package with my blank 3.5" floppies to get the release?
How many blank floppies should I send? I think I can get them in bulk on eBay.
I’m in no hurry, so return by pre-paid surface mail is fine for me (it will
take me time to convert my C++ GR blocks to C#).

  • Tim

Discuss-gnuradio mailing list
[email protected]
Discuss-gnuradio Info Page
This is probably an opportune time to announce my fork of Gnu Radio that
uses Swift instead of C++. I got my teenage son to do the re-writes,
since
he’s learning Swift at school. Creamy goodness.

17

“This also allowed us to modify the block API. The downside is, all OOT
modules will be incompatible with GR4”

I have to ask for real - is this part of the April fools joke, or is it
true?

:slight_smile: