Gr-smart meters Setup Guide

The following install guide details the steps from a fresh Ubuntu 20.04 install to a fully running GNU Radio + USRP B200 frequency hopping spread spectrum setup needed to capture smart meter data. The guide will be updated/broken out as additional SDR's like the HackRF and RTL-SDR are added.

Install Ubuntu 20.04

There is nothing special about Ubuntu, it was chosen because it works well across different computers and has a familiar interface. Likely these instructions can be used as a rough guide for what is needed with other distro's.

For now, this step is to install a base version of Ubuntu 20.04, mine was a minimal install. After finishing your install ensure you update everything.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Install dependencies

The block at the top is standard from the GNU Radio install guide. The two additional below are vim so you get nice colors in your editor and liborc which is needed for the additional GNU Radio blocks that will be installed.

sudo apt install git cmake g++ libboost-all-dev libgmp-dev swig python3-numpy python3-mako python3-sphinx python3-lxml doxygen libfftw3-dev libsdl1.2-dev libgsl-dev libqwt-qt5-dev libqt5opengl5-dev python3-pyqt5 liblog4cpp5-dev libzmq3-dev python3-yaml python3-click python3-click-plugins python3-zmq python3-scipy python3-gi python3-gi-cairo gobject-introspection gir1.2-gtk-3.0

sudo apt install liborc-0.4-dev vim

Install GNU Radio 3.8

This guide and the blocks used here are all dependent on GNU Radio 3.8. As 3.9 has been released for a while more blocks and packages are getting support so this guide may be updated in the future to support 3.9.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gnuradio/gnuradio-releases-3.8
sudo apt update
sudo apt install gnuradio

For USRP B200 Support

This is specific to the USRP B200 software defined radio, if you are using another SDR this will not be necessary.

Install necessary packages

sudo apt-get install libuhd-dev libuhd3.15.0 uhd-host

Download firmware needed for different USRP devices

If this doesn't work your files may have been installed in /usr/local/lib instead of /usr/lib

sudo /usr/lib/uhd/utils/uhd_images_downloader.py

Configure USB and test USRP B200

cd /usr/lib/uhd/utils/
sudo cp uhd-usrp.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/
sudo udevadm control --reload-rules
sudo udevadm trigger
uhd_usrp_probe

Install Frequency Hopping Utilities

If you already have GNU Radio and your SDR setup you should start here to install the Sandia Laboratories out of tree (OOT) modules. Four different OOT modules are needed.

1. PDU Utilities
2. FHSS Utilities
3. Timing Utilities
4. Sandia Utilities

Create a folder to organize them

cd
mkdir FHSS_Utils
cd FHSS_Utils

Install PDU Utilities

git clone https://github.com/sandialabs/gr-pdu_utils.git
cd gr-pdu_utils/
git checkout maint-3.8
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make -j8
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig
cd ..

Install FHSS Utilities

git clone https://github.com/sandialabs/gr-fhss_utils.git
cd gr-fhss_utils/
git checkout maint-3.8
mkdir build
cd build/
cmake ..
make -j8
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig
cd ..

Install Timing Utilities

git clone https://github.com/sandialabs/gr-timing_utils.git
cd gr-timing_utils/
git checkout maint-3.8
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make -j8
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig
cd ..

Install Sandia Utilities

git clone https://github.com/sandialabs/gr-sandia_utils.git
cd gr-sandia_utils/
git checkout maint-3.8
mkdir build
cd build/
cmake ..
make -j8
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig
cd ..

Setup PYTHONPATH

gnuradio-companion will give you errors if it can't find your python libraries that were just installed. Also highly suggest starting gnuradio-companion from a terminal as opposed to the icon in Ubuntu. It gives you a nice way to see console output and you have to configure path variables in other places to run gnuradio-companion with the icon.

1. Figure out where your dist-packages is located
2. Open your .bashrc file and add that path
3. close all open terminals and re-open them

Figure out where dist-packages is located

If your system is like mine they will be in:

/usr/local/lib/python3/dist-packages

You can easily confirm by using "ls" to show all the files there, if you see folder names corresponding to the packages installed above you have the correct folder. If not, try searching for other occurrences of "dist-packages" on your system where they may have been placed.

Edit .bashrc and add PYTHONPATH

Add the following to the end of your .bashrc if there is no PYTHONPATH variable.

export PYTHONPATH=/usr/local/lib/python3/dist-packages/

Finish up

Close all open terminal windows and then open a new one.

Start GNU Radio and open FHSS Flowgraph

ToDo:

• Add details here on where flowgraph is stored (FHSS Examples Folder)
• Add information on what settings need to be changed to target smart meter data