Is there a simple way to implement communication between two computers running GNUradio using the standard blocks set?
What I am have now is this:
On a Linux computer, GNUradio is running and receiving input from a Radio peripheral. On that computer I can see the received waveform on a WX scope. I can also use sliders and input boxes to change things like the receiver frequency.
What I'd like to do is this:
On a Windows computer, I have the WX scope and sliders. When I move the a slider or change an input box, that data gets sent to the Linux, which is still running the radio receiver on Gnuradio. The received signal goes through a stream back to the windows, and gets displayed on the WX scope on Windows.
Someone elsewhere suggested using the ZMQ blocks, however, when I tried setting up a PUSH/PULL to transmit a sine wave from the Linux to the Windows, nothing went through. The guy who recommended that approach tried the same and also could not get it working, so I think that block might be broken?
So is there any alternative blocks that can do what I'm trying to do? Preferably something well documented, and available on GNUradio-companion.
Depending on the data rate from the receiver, it's possible to encounter performance issues attempting to send raw waveform data using e.g. the UDP blocks, where the sender may print an error similar to the following:
gr::log :WARN: udp_source0 - Too much data; dropping packet.
Because the scope widgets usually only display a portion of the input data, a more ideal way of remotely visualizing the waveform might be to only send the rendered scope widget (e.g. using a remote desktop such as VNC or X2Go). Although this solution reaches beyond your original problem, it is probably easier to use in the long run for cases involving two-way GUI interaction.
For the scope widget data, the UDP sink and source blocks seem to be native to GNU Radio, and are either sufficiently documented solution or simple enough for this problem, again taking firewall configuration into consideration as #Zephyr mentioned.
From GRC, specify in the UDP blocks:
the hostname or IP address of the display computer, and
a choose port number that isn't already in use (and were you using Linux, OS X, or anything UNIX-like, not any port below 1024).
For setting variables over the network, you might try the XMLRPC blocks, as described in another answer. These were recently deprecated, however.
See my other answer for discussion of alternative if performance issues arise.
Both Linux and Windows should have firewalls which might be blocking the connections.
You need to post the error messages displayed in gnuradio-companion.
Related
Is there any recommended way to inspect/plot the numeric values that are being sent through the ports between drake systems in real-time?. (something similar to rqt_plot in ROS). Apart from the SignalLogger or writing and wiring custom individual plotting Systems, is there any method to access the port values internally?
There's nothing as nice as rqt_plot as far as I know.
If you are able to alter your Diagram before calling DiagramBuilder::Build, you could add an LcmScopeSystem onto any vector-valued output port and then the port's contents will be transmitted on an LCM channel. You can add multiple scopes, but you currently have to add them one by one, ahead of time.
Once the data is onto an LCM channel, then you could use the provided drake-lcm-spy program which has the ability to show (very rudimentary) live plots:
cd drake
bazel build //lcmtypes:drake-lcm-spy
bazel-bin/lcmtypes/drake-lcm-spy &
Also tangentially related would be https://github.com/RobotLocomotion/drake/issues/5857, though that is not on any near-term roadmap.
I am working with two tcl files. One is a program that connects to a thermal scanner to get information from it via ethernet. I have integrated the other tcl GUI that can reflash the scanner via ethernet. How do I use the connection from the first one to use the flash utility on the second GUI? At first, the two GUI's were separate but I had to combine them for customers.
-let me know if you need any code, the programs are about 4000 lines long so I didnt want to put them on here.
A single TCP connection can only really be used by one process (at each end) at a time; trying to do otherwise causes confusion. Can you just get each program to talk to the thermal scanner directly? At least theoretically, it ought be able to support multiple simultaneous connections, and that'd be a simple way to work.
But if the device won't work that way, the easiest way to multiplex the communications is to have a single process that actually talks to the device and for the other programs to talk to that multiplexer process (probably via a local socket). The multiplexer doesn't need to have a GUI, but would be told to do things like “flash this file to the scanner” or “stream values out of the scanner”. The details of how to do all this will depend very much on what's actually going on with the communications, but the fcopy command is highly likely to be useful in this, as it can be used to efficiently stream data from one Tcl channel to another.
Background: I'm a fourth year computer engineering major at UCSB. I've taken networking and operating systems courses. I created a program in userspace that broadcasts UDP packets onto the subnet and receives UDP packets in an adhoc network. What I'm trying to accomplish is to convert this program into a kernel module that will work on an ARM embedded system with Angstrom Linux, kernel version 2.6.39 (the x86 to ARM architecture cross compilation is an issue for another day). The reason for this move to the kernel is to shed some of the overhead of userspace functions and to make the sending and receiving part as quick as possible.
I've never done anything like this before in any of the courses I've taken, so please tell me if anything I am saying is incorrect, useless or inefficient!
After research with Google, I've concluded the typical way is to do away with sockets entirely and work with the sockbuf structure and fill in the necessary headers myself. Would this have an effect on the ability to broadcast packets on the subnet?
I am currently trying to follow the code here:
UDP packet send with linux-kernel module without using sockets
I've figured out the reasoning behind most of the code, but the last part is what confuses me:
eth = (struct ethhdr *) skb_push(skb, ETH_HLEN);
skb_reset_mac_header(skb);
skb->protocol = eth->h_proto = htons(ETH_P_IP);
memcpy(eth->h_source, dev->dev_addr, ETH_ALEN);
memcpy(eth->h_dest, remote_mac, ETH_ALEN);
skb->dev = dev;
dev_queue_xmit(skb);
All of the ethernet header seems to be constructed purely out of headers defined in the kernel besides the source MAC address, is this correct? I am going to be broadcasting my packets, so what exactly should be put into the destination MAC address field?
More importantly, what is dev in the skb->dev = dev; line? From my investigation, it is a pointer to the device driver it is associated with. From my understanding, I would want this to point to the wireless chip device driver as I am using 802.11 to communicate. Do I have to create my own dev struct for the wireless driver? If so, there any guidance on how to accomplish this? If not, how can I access the existing device driver and use this in a kernel module?
I've tried commenting out the dev line and running the code but unsurprisingly I get a kernel panic once it executes dev_queue_xmit(skb);.
Again, I've never done anything like this before, so any advice would be helpful, even if it means changing my approach entirely! I also understand that this could be a niche of a question, but any sort of guidance is appreciated!
Thank you in advance!
The best way is not to interfere with the protocol if you are not trying to modify one. Work on a higher (socket) layer. This API can be found in net/socket.c
This will help: (open in new browser tab/window to zoom)
I have a server application that receives some special TCP packet from a client and needs to react to it as soon as possible by sending an high-level ACK to the client (the TCP ACK won't suite my needs).
However, this server is really network intensive and sometimes the packet will take too long to be sent (like 200ms in a local network, when a simple server application can send it in less than 1ms).
Is there a way to mark this packet with a high-priority tag or something like that in Delphi? Or maybe with the Win32 API?
Thanks in advance.
EDIT
Thanks for all the answers so far. I'll add some details. My product has the following setup: there are several devices that are built upon vehicles with WIFI conectivity. When they arrive at the garage, those device connect to my server and start to transmit data.
Because of hardware limitations, I implemented a high-level ACK to make the device aware that the last packet arrived successfully (please, don't argue about this - the data may be broken even if I got a correct TCP ACK). However, if I use my server software, that communicates with a remote database, to issue this ACK, I get very long delay (>200ms). If I use an exclusive software to do this task, I get small latencies (<1ms). So, I was imagining if I could just tell Windows to send those special packets first, as it seems to me that this package is getting delayed so the database ones can get delivered.
That's the motivation behind my question.
EDIT 2
As requested: this is legacy software and I'm using the legacy dclsockets140.bpl package and Delphi 2010 (14.0.3593.25826).
IMO it is very difficult to realize this. there are a lot of equipment and software involved. first of all, if you communicate between 2 different OS's you got a latency. second, soft and hard firewalls, antiviruses, everything is filtering/delaying your package.
you can try also to 'hack' the system(this involve some very good knowledge on how the frames/segments are packed/send,flow control,congestion,etc), either by altering it from code, either by using some tools like http://half-open.com/ or others.
In short, passing MSG_OOB flag to the send function marks the data as "urgent". Detailed discussion about the OOB in the context of Windows Sockets implementation specifics is available here.
is it easy to write a script to test whether the network is ever down for the next 24 or 48 hours? I can use ssh to connect to a shell and come back 48 hours later to see if it is still connected to see if the network has ever been down, but can i do it programmatically easily?
The Internet (and your ethernet) is a packet-switched network, which makes the definition of 'down' difficult.
Some things are obvious; for example, if your ethernet card doesn't report a link, then it's down (unless you have redundant connections). But having a link doesn't mean its up.
The basic, 100 mile view of how the Internet works is that your computer splits the data it wants to send into ~1500-byte segments called packets. It then, pretty much blindly, sends them on their way, however your routing table says to. Then that machine repeats the process. Eventually, through many repetitions, it reaches the remote host.
So, you may be tempted to define up as the packet reached its destination. But, what happens if the packet gets corrupted, e.g., due to faulty hardware or interference? The next router will just discard it. Ok, that's fine, you may well want to consider that down. What if a router on the path is too busy, or the link it needs to be sent on is full? The packet will be dropped. You probably don't want to count that as down.
Packets routinely get lost; higher-level protocols (e.g., TCP) deal with it and retransmit the packet. In fact, TCP uses the packet drop on link full behavior to discover the link bandwidth.
You can monitor packet loss with a tool like ping, as the other answer states.
If your need is more adminstrative in nature, and using existing software is an option, you could try something like monit:
http://mmonit.com/monit/
Wikipedia has a list of similar software:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_network_monitoring_systems
You should consider also whether very short outages need to be detected. Obviously, a periodic reachability test cannot guarantee detecting outages shorter than the testing interval.
If you only care about whether there was an outage, not how many there were or how long they lasted, you should be able to automate your existing ssh technique using expect pretty easily.
http://expect.nist.gov/
Most platforms support a ping command that can be used to find out if a network path exists to an IP address somewhere "else". Where, exactly, to check depends on what you are really trying to answer.
If the goal is to discover the reliability of your first hop to your ISP's network, then pinging a router or their DNS regularly might be sufficient.
If your concern is really the connection to a single node (your mention of leaving an ssh session open implies this) then just pinging that node is probably the best idea. The ping command will usually fail in a way that a script can test if the connection times out.
Regardless, it is probably a good idea to check at a rate no faster than once a minute, and slower than that is probably sufficient.