FOSDEM and Hackfest Followup

We're back now from our Berlin Hackfest and FOSDEM. We had a great time and got a ton done. I tried to keep track of our work and progress at the Hackfest, so take a look at the wiki page for details on that. Basically, we all got a lot accomplished that improves the code base of GNU Radio as well as a handful of other side projects.

One important item for everyone to keep in mind is that we are once again pursuing GSoC as a mentor organization. We are working on our list of GNU Radio projects for this summer. 

And thanks again to c-base for hosting us!

We went straight from the Berlin hackfest to FOSDEM. I spoke on the hardware main track, and we had a full schedule and packed room on Sunday for the SDR Dev Room. They have the video for my talk posted already, though sadly it missed the first 15 minutes and there is a problem with how the slides were captured. We're also waiting for the videos from Sunday's dev room to get posted, hopefully with no problems.

Oh, and I have posted my slides and all of the GRC flowgraphs I created for my talk here.

Latest GR Hackfest

We held our latest GNU Radio Hackfest at Ettus Research last week, and it was one of our most successful yet. It was also our largest gathering of one of these week-long events with something like 25 people at the most (plus or minus since a few were Ettus employees so had to come and go as they could). We had a huge amount of code worked on during the week with contributions from all over the field to make the project better. We fixed a number of bugs and issues that we've been meaning to deal with for a while, and we saw a good amount of other advances to the project happen. We haven't updated the hackfest wiki page yet with our projects, but you can certainly look forward to a lot of the results and features in the next release next week.

European Hackfest hosted by TU Delft

If you follow GNU Radio at all, I'm sure you've heard about our Hackfests. This is where a lot of GNU Radio developers get together for a few days to a week at a time and hack out GNU Radio code. We've found these fantastic ways to improve the project as it gives us time to plan, discuss specific topics, hang out and get to know each other, and code code code! A large amount of the code making up GNU Radio has either come directly from or been inspired by these events.

Mostly, we've done these in the US. Ettus Research has been a fantastic host to a number of our hackfests as has Virginia Tech. Just recently, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology hosted a mini hackfest right after the WSR and a full hackfest a few months later. These were our first events held in Europe, and though I personally missed the second one, the post-WSR hackfest was great fun and hugely successful.

Following up on this, I wanted to announce and give a pre-emptive thanks to TU Delft in the Netherlands who has agreed to host a hackfest early next year! The plan is to hold the hackfest on TU Delft campus during the last week of January so that we can go straight from Delft to Brussels for FOSDEM that weekend (partly assuming that we have an SDR dev room at FOSDEM again this year). I think having these two events back-to-back is, pardon the Irish, going to be great craic. 

Want to come to the hackfest? We certainly don't want to discourage anyone, but I also want to point out that the hackfests are usually smallish affairs of 10 to 20 developers, usually people heavily involved in either writing or using GNU Radio regularly. So the facilities are on the small side to fit us, and you're on your own for housing, food, transportation, etc. But, if this is something that excites you and you can make it to Delft, please let me know if you'd like to come. Just shoot me an email. And if you don't know my email address, then you probably haven't been using GNU Radio that much :p

Release 3.7.3 and the WSR Hackfest

In case you missed the announcement, we've released version 3.7.3 of GNU Radio!

We're really pretty excited about this release. If you look at the news announcement or our changelog, you can see that we had many contributors to this release. It's also about a month overdue from our normal (though unspecified) timeline. But the result is something that we are really happy with.

One thing that strikes me with all of the contributions on this one is the amount people are really using GNU Radio for interesting stuff. They are testing all sorts of use cases, corner cases, and types of cases we don't yet have names for. Hard to find all of those issues without that kind of testing and use. So I feel good about the state of where we are with this version.

And then came the Workshop on Software Radio (WSR) in Karlsruhe. I presented two papers. The first was from Tim O'Shea and myself on our work on gr-benchmark and stats.gnuradio.org, and the second was on using our polyphase filterbank blocks in GNU Radio.

Following WSR, however, was our first European GNU Radio Hackfest. It was two and a half days and went brilliantly. Lots of fun, lots of good discussion, and lots of code written (and rewritten). There were a number of issues posted and pull requests made for new features or minor issues. In a way, it's a shame that some of these didn't make it into our 3.7.3 release, but we can't just keep waiting, so these will all make it into 3.7.4. I think we're just seeing a lot of interest and energy with the project and so we have to mark some time to get the releases out when we can.

We've logged our work from the hackfest as we always do. And I believe I have taken care of all issues and pull requests, so you'll find all the new (working and available stuff) already in the GNU Radio master branch.

Specifically, it was important to wrap up the loose ends of that hackfest as quickly as possible because we're heading right into our next hackfest at Ettus Research next week in California! So I expect more great stuff to come soon.