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.
Contents
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 additional, 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
Install UHD 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.
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
