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Plucking data from thin air with software-defined radio

Please read the Before you arrive section below, uhm, before you arrive. And "before you arrive" doesn't mean in your hotel room the night before, or right before your flight leaves. Read it a couple of days before you leave your home. There is hardware you need to participate that you'll need to purchase online and you'll want to have it before you leave.

Before you arrive

We'll be installing and configuring lots of stuff during this workshop. In many ways, that's the main point. The tools around software-defined radio can be a bit niche and often fiddly. Being guided through setup helps immensely.

However, there are some tools that you should set up before you come. And, some things you need to purchase to get any use out of the workshop.

Hardware requirements

This demo uses a software-defined radio. Despite the use of the word software in its name, software-defined radio is actually a hardware device. So, you'll need to buy an SDR and an antenna to do this workshop. No worries, SDRs are fairly inexpensive.

Here's the load-out I like to use. It includes the SDR dongle and a small selection of antennas that will work with it.

You will need to have purchased this before coming to the workshop. It's hardware, you can't download it.

Software requirements

Technically, you could install these dependencies during the workshop, but there is much to do and having them in place before hand will let you focus on the fun parts of the workshop. Plus, conference wifi:

  • Node.js: All of the code for this workshop is written using TypeScript. Don't worry if you're a JavaScript hater, you won't have to write any code, but you will need to compile, well, transpile the code and run it. You'll need Node.js for that. Any version at or above v16 should work but I built the workshop using v18.

  • Docker: We'll be using Docker to install Redis 8, which is where we will store the data we capture using the SDR you just purchased. You did purchase one, right?

Installing NPM packages

In the code folder there are folders for several tools. We could install a massive pile of NPM packages over conference wifi, or we could do it before we arrive. Go into each folder—dashboard-client through power-meter—and run:

npm install

Installing Redis from Docker1

Downloading Docker images before you show up is probably a good idea. The version of Redis we are using is Redis 8, which is still in a milestone release. It's likely that there will be a new milestone before the workshop, but this version should work fine.

docker run -d --name redis-8-m2 -p 6379:6379 redis:8.0-M02

Footnotes

  1. If for some reason you can't install Docker—perhaps work has your laptop locked down like Fort Knox—you can use Redis Cloud's free tier instead. Sign up anytime. ↩