31Jan, 2015
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2015.01-rc2 Update

A 2015.01-rc2 release candidate has been posted to GitHub.

This update includes a number of libbladeRF fixes and improvements, as well as a few minor bladeRF-cli fixes. Next week we’ll post an updated beta Windows installer and update the Ubuntu PPA.

Thanks to the efforts and suggestions by Cosmin from Null Team and YateBTS, the issue of devices requiring power-on-resets (on some USB 3.0 controllers) after an application exits without closing a bladeRF device handle has been resolved! To GNU Radio Companion users affected by this issue, this means the bladeRF should now happily re-open and continue to operate if you use the (red X) “Kill the flowgraph” button.

To aid those debugging applications which may suppress libbladeRF’s log output to stderr, mambrus provided patches to introduce syslog support to libbladeRF, as well as to control the default verbosity level via a BLADERF_LOG_LEVEL environment variable. As noted by the libbladeRF README.md, syslog can be enabled at compile-time by passing DENABLE_LIBBLADERF_SYSLOG=ON to CMake. This functionaliy is not enabled by default, as to remain consistent with previous versions.

Some additional libbladeRF fixes have resolved some unintended attenuation in the bladeRF’s normal tuning range when using the XB-200 (i.e., with the XB-200 mixer in bypass mode). Another libbladeRF fix addresses some noticeable spectral images that could be observed prior to running any of the LMS6002D DC calibration routines.

While working on his Haskell bindings, victoredwardocallaghan identified and provided a fix for some bladeRF-cli documentation build issues on NixOS. Arch Linux users may have also experienced this when building the bladeRF-cli interactive help and manual page. Should anyone continue to see issues here, please let us know via the issue tracker.

As always, thank you to everyone on #bladeRF (Freenode), the Nuand forums, GitHub, etc., (and whomever I inevitably forgot to thank above) who has kindly offered suggestions/fixes, advice, and reported issues. It’s a huge help, and we really appreciate it!

– Jon (jynik)

23Dec, 2014
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2014.12-rc1 Update

A 2014.12-rc1 release candidate has been posted to GitHub.

This update just ties up some loose ends pertaining to the Cypress driver backend (for Windows), and adds a couple libbladeRF API calls for identifying devices in bootloader mode and downloading firmware to them.

A corresponding beta Windows installer has been posted here and linked to from the installers page. This includes the option to use either the libusb (WinUSB) driver or CyUSB3 driver.

Have a wonderful and safe holiday season folks!

– Jon (jynik)

30Nov, 2014
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2014.11 Release

The 2014.11 release has been posted to GitHub.

This release is intended to be a relatively stable point for package maintainers and application developers to base their work upon.

As noted on the aforementioned release page, some important fixes have been included:

  • libbladeRF now waits for SPI flash autoloading to complete when opening a device. This requires FX3 Firmware v1.8.0. If you’re using flash-based FPGA autoloading, you may be interested in trying out host-based FPGA autoloading.
  • FPGA v0.1.2 includes fixes in timestamp functionality.
  • An issue causing SPI flash corruption when using libusb with the WinUSB driver has been addressed. Some users encountered this with the 2014.11-RC3 installer and had to recover from the bootloader.

As denoted by the libbladeRF version bump to v1.0.0, the API is now being treated as “stable,” meaning that its users can operate under the assumption that no further reverse-incompatible changes will be made within the 1.x.x series. There are no plans to introduce any changes that would warrant a version bump to 2.x.x in forseeable future.

libbladeRF 1.0.0 API documentation has been uploaded to the Nuand website, and is linked from the Support page. This Support page link will be updated with each successive libbladeRF update, but older documentation will remain on the site for reference.

The Windows installer and its associated instructions have been updated. The Ubuntu PPA has also been updated, thanks to Ryan!

For those looking to contribute, a few helpful documents have been added to the source tree:

As always, thank you so much to everyone who has contributed bug reports, fixes, feedback, and suggestions. It is greatly appreciated!

– Jon (jynik)