This tool is intended to aid in development and testing. bladeRF-cli can be used from the command line for simple operations, such as loading the bladeRF FPGA. However, a majority of this tool's functionality is accessible when run in its interactive mode.
- libbladeRF
- libtecla (optional)
The bladeRF-cli build should detect whether libtecla is installed, and configure the ENABLE_LIBTECLA variable accordingly. You can override this when configuring the build with CMake via a -DENABLE_LIBTECLA=OFF argument.
For usage information, run:
./bladeRF-cli --help
If you encounter issues and ask folks on IRC or in the forum assistance, it's always helpful to note the CLI and library versions:
bladeRF-cli --version
bladeRF-cli --lib-version
If only one device is connected, the -d option is not needed. The CLI will find and open the attached device. This option is required if multiple devices are connected. For the sake of completeness, the following examples will include this command line option, using the libusb backend.
Load the FPGA and enter interactive mode:
./bladeRF-cli -d "libusb: instance=0" -l /path/to/fpga.rbf -i
Pass in a script to setup a device in a specific way, but do not enter interactive mode. (See Creating a setup.txt for more information about scripts.)
./bladeRF-cli -d "libusb: instance=0" -s setup.txt
The help command prints out the top level commands that are available. Using help <cmd> gives a more detailed help on that command.
The most useful control commands are peek and poke for setting registers at a very basic level and print and set for performing system level tasks like setting gains, frequency, bandwidth or sample rate.
The rx and tx commands allow data to be transmitted and received in the background, while the interactive console remains in the foreground.
rx config and tx config are used to configure and view various RX and TX parameters. Note that rx and tx is a supported shorthand for viewing the RX/TX configuration. See help rx and help tx for more information about these parameters. Below are a few examples:
Receive 10,000 samples to a binary file (host endianness):
rx config file=samples.bin format=bin n=10000
rx start
rx or rx config may be used to view the RX task status. When it no longer reports "Running", the samples should be available in the file. Note that for larger sample rate or small values of n, the RX task may finish before you can enter the rx command to view its state.
Receive 4096 samples to a CSV file:
rx config file=samples.csv format=csv n=4096
rx start
Files can also be transmitted:
tx config file=samples.bin
tx start
The transmission of the file can be repeated a number of times, with a configurable delay (microseconds) between each repetition:
tx config file=samples.bin repeat=100 delay=10000
tx start
While format=csv is valid for tx, note that the CLI will first convert the CSV to a temporary binary file:
bladeRF> tx config file=samples.txt format=csv repeat=10 delay=10000000
bladeRF> tx start
Converted CSV file to binary file. Using /tmp/bladeRF-ddLNmc
Note that this program will not delete the temporary file.
bladeRF> tx
State: Running
File: /tmp/bladeRF-ddLNmc
Format: C16, Binary (Little Endian)
Repeat: 10 iterations
Repeat delay: 10000000 us
It is often useful in debugging to quickly get the device into a known state. The bladeRF-cli supports script files to alleviate the need to write a small program or manually enter a number of commands. (Running scripts from within scripts or the interactive mode is comming soon!)
Below is a sample setup.txt file which can be provided via the -s command line option. Note that the syntax from the interactive mode is used, # may be used to comment out the remainder of a line.
set frequency 1000000000 # Tune to 1 GHz on both RX and TX
set samplerate 10000000 # Sample @ 10 MHz
set bandwidth 28000000 # 28 MHz bandwidth
# Configure gains
set lnagain bypass
set txvga1 -14
set txvga2 20
set rxvga1 20
set rxvga2 20
# Print out a few settings
print frequency
print samplerate
print bandwidth