soapy_power not working with a BladeRF

[gaut777]

Hi,

I have a BladeRF and I try to use qspectrumanalyzer with it.

SoapySDRUtil is working fine (picture 1). bladeRF-cli is working fine.

But not soapy_power (picture 2). soapy_power --device bladerf --detect and soapy_power --debug don't run too (no devices found).

When I try to see if I have two different versions of soapy_power (picture 3), I get a permission problem (run user) or an invalid argument (proc):

Finally, which soapy_power gives : ~/.local/bin/soapy_power ; so I added it to the LD_LIBRARY_PATH and I'm working inside the directory but it doesn't change anything.

It's the last step for me to work with qspectrumanalyzer so I hope you will have an idea! Thanks for your help!

Gautier

[zuckschwerdt]

Check with SoapySDRUtil --info which version you have and where modules are located.
Then check that soapy_power uses that same version. You might have installed SimpleSoapy with a different Soapy version?

[gaut777]

Here is what I have:

Indeed, I have two times the modules0.8 that appears when I type SoapySDRUtil --info, could it be the problem?

And all the versions seem different also.

[zuckschwerdt]

python3-soapysdr with version 0.8.1 seems to match. Not sure why SimpleSoapy / soapy_power can't locate the modules or enumearte them. Perhaps try the SimpleSoapy examples in a Python shell?

[gaut777]

I tried that but nothing working. So it means that both simplesoapy and soapy_power don't work.

[zuckschwerdt]

This is stock Ubuntu Jammy, right? I'll later try to reproduce the environment.
I've never used the Python bindings though and don't have any concrete ideas.

I hope somebody else can help out?

[gaut777]

Yes! It would be very nice from you to make a try!

And of course if somebody else has an idea, it would be really helpful for me to make it up to work, but unfortunately installing packages and managing versions is not what I prefer... :/

[zuckschwerdt]

I got the same here. SoapySDRUtil --info looks good, SoapySDRUtil --make=driver=rtlsdr works -- but only when using sudo which might be a clue.

Then simplesoapy does work but only on the second try and only with sudo:

sudo python3

import simplesoapy
simplesoapy.detect_devices()

Also plain SoapySDR python bindings work:

sudo python3

import SoapySDR
SoapySDR.Device.enumerate()

Check that it's not a permission problem. But that might be just my very minimal install using

$ sudo apt install python3-soapysdr soapysdr-tools python3-pip
$ pip install simplesoapy
$ sudo pip install simplesoapy

on a plain stock Jammy image.

If the plain SoapySDR python example works this issue might be for simplesoapy.

[gaut777]

Thanks for this little update. The plain SoapySDR python example does not work for me unfortunately. It is interesting to see that I have a different output while doing pip install simplesoapy and sudo pip install simplesoapy. I will check again on monday! What do you mean about permission? To execute as a simple user? Even If I do sudo I get the same results so I don't think so :/

[gaut777]

Hi,

Today I have tried to do again what I have already did before to see then what you told me, but nothing is working anymore (I cannot detect my BladeRF anymore except with the bladeRF-cli command). And even SoapySDRUtil --info give me other versions than before.

In my case, I also installed more packages than you did. I have installed SoapySDR, SoapyBladeRF, qspectrumanalyzer, pybladeRF, PothosCore, LibBladeRF, bladeRF. So there is a risk of having multiple times a same package. To be honest I am lost right now and I have no more idea on how to overcome this problem!