HackRF Beta Program - DevRaf-Per/hackrf GitHub Wiki
Welcome to the HackRF beta program! This page is intended as a starting point for people participating in the beta. If you have received a beta unit, please read this page.
Beta Program Information
For background information about the beta program, see Giving Away HackRF.
The purpose of the beta program is to find bugs. There will be bugs. There may be hardware design bugs. There may be firmware bugs. There may be software bugs. There may be manufacturing bugs. With your help, we should be able to find the most important bugs, enabling better HackRF platforms in the future.
The primary goal of the HackRF project is to produce an open source hardware design for general purpose SDR. With your help, we can ensure the quality of the design.
Beta Hardware
The HackRF beta hardware platform is Jawbreaker. For an introduction to the device and information about how to prepare it for external antenna connection see the Jawbreaker page.
Jawbreaker is a development tool. It has not been tested for compliance with regulations governing transmission and reception of radio signals. You are responsible for operating Jawbreaker in a manner permitted by the laws of your country.
Handling your Jawbreaker
Jawbreaker is distributed as a bare circuit board. It is fragile and may be damaged by electrostatic discharge (ESD) or by contact with conductive objects or surfaces during operation. Handle your Jawbreaker only by its edges. Do not operate Jawbreaker on a metal surface. Store your Jawbreaker in its anti-static bag when not in use.
You may wish to protect your Jawbreaker with an enclosure. A design for a laser-cut acrylic enclosure is available.
Software
*** Read this whole section thoroughly before starting any software installation! Some of the options may include steps that duplicate installation of individual components, so you will end up wasting a lot of time re-installing what you've already got! ***
The primary software library required to work with Jawbreaker is libhackrf. To use any software that supports HackRF, you must first install libhackrf.
You will need to update the firmware on your Jawbreaker to use the latest software.
You can download the latest HackRF source code release package or use source from the git repository. The release package includes a firmware binary that you can use if you don't want to set up a cross-compiler.
Software known to support HackRF:
- GNU Radio: THE open source SDR software framework, with HackRF support provided by gr-osmosdr
- Under Linux the entire installation of hackrf, gr-osmosdr, gnu-radio (3.6) and all dependencies can be automatically installed using Marcus D. Leech's excellent build-gnuradio script
- hackrf-tools: command-line utilities for HackRF, included in the HackRF source tree
- If you used build-gnuradio, once the script has finished you can simply do:
cd hackrf/host/hackrf-tools && mkdir build && cd build && cmake .. && make && sudo make install
- If you used build-gnuradio, once the script has finished you can simply do:
The latest 3.6 release of GNU Radio is recommended. Significant changes toward 3.7 are underway in the git repository. Use gr-osmosdr's gr3.6 branch for compatibility with GNU Radio 3.6.
Software with HackRF support coming soon:
- SDR#: A graphical SDR receiver application
Linux distributions known to include libhackrf:
Testing
The best way to help test HackRF is to use it for a radio application that interests you. If you aren't sure where to start, try getting familiar with GNU Radio, especially GNU Radio Companion. Search the web for interesting SDR implementations and see if you can reproduce them with HackRF.
Communication
Please subscribe to the HackRF-dev mailing list. This is the preferred way to share test results or ask questions. Additionally, you may want to join the #hackrf IRC channel on freenode. Specific bugs and feature requests may be added to the Issues List though they should probably be discussed on the mailing list or IRC first.