Sdrangelcli NPM

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Introduction

⚠ WARNING: this is a work in progress

This is a browser based web client for SDRangel SDR software Please click on the link to get more information.

You may also ask questions about SDRangel or this web application in the SDRangel group in groups.io

SDRangel is a Software Defined Radio (SDR) application that processes the digital samples produced by various SDR front end devices (RTL-SDR, LimeSDR, ...) using software running on commodity computers to implement radio processing functions that used to be handled by hardware e.g AM, FM demodulation... SDRangel is also capable of driving SDR transmitters in a reversed flow: it produces digital samples that are sent to a SDR transmitter (LimeSDR, HackRF...) to eventually produce a RF signal.

This web application communicates with a SDRangel running instance (GUI based or headless) using its HTTP REST API. It is written based on Angular (see development section for more details).

It can be used to remotely control a GUI based version of SDRangel and also serve as a UI for the headless version. Most of the functions can be accessed using this web interface.

Prerequisites

Step 1. Node & Git

Make sure you have Git installed
Make sure you have NodeJS 12 or later installed on your machine
Make sure you have npm (Node Package Manager, comes bundled with NodeJS) at least version 6

You can check whether you already have them and your current versions by executing

git --version
node --version
npm --version

Install node JS and NPM:

Arch:

sudo pacman -S nodejs npm

Debian/Raspbian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install nodejs npm

OpenSUSE:

sudo zypper in nodejs npm

If you need to use multiple node versions on your machine consider using:

nvm (OSX, Linux)
nodist (Win)
nvm-windows (Win)

You might want update the `npm` to the latest version by doing:

sudo npm install npm -g

Step 2. Clone the repository and set up environment

# clone → it will create the directory named 'sdrangelcli' in the current one
git clone https://github.com/f4exb/sdrangelcli

# install global dependencies
sudo npm install -g @angular/cli@8

# install local dependencies
cd sdrangelcli
npm install

# check that everything is working by running the following and opening http://localhost:4200 in your browser afterwards
npm start

Be patient npm install can be very long depending on your hardware.

Build and serve

Build

# build
cd sdrangelcli
npm run build

# This will create a dist/sdrangelcli directory that will contain the application
# You can copy or move sdrangelcli directory wherever you like

Serve directly

# Install a simple node.js server
sudo npm install http-server -g

# in the dist/sdrangelcli directory do
http-server

# By default http-server listens on all available network interfaces on port 8080.
# This can be changed with the options:
#   -p <port>
#   -a <address> This is the address of the network interface on the server

Serve with supervisord

We will not cover supervisord setup and jump into the creation of a .conf file for sdrangelcli.

Assumptions:

the distribution is installed in /opt/build/sdrangelcli/dist/sdrangelcli
the network interface address is 192.168.2.1 and port 8001 will be used
the user name is f4exb

You may adapt it to your own needs.

Create a /etc/supervisor.d/sdrangelcli.conf with this content:

[program:sdrangelcli]
directory = /opt/build/sdrangelcli/dist/sdrangelcli
command = http-server -a 192.168.2.1 -p 8001
process_name = sdrangelcli
user = f4exb
stopsignal = INT
autostart = false
autorestart = false
environment =
    USER=f4exb,
    PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/bin/site_perl:/usr/bin/vendor_perl:/usr/bin/core_perl",
    HOME="/home/f4exb"
redirect_stderr = true
stdout_logfile = /home/f4exb/log/sdrangelcli.log
stdout_logfile_maxbytes = 10MB
stdout_logfile_backups = 3
loglevel = debug

In /etc/supervisord.conf add /etc/supervisor.d/sdrangelcli.conf to the list of processes controlled by supervisord:

...
[include]
files = /etc/supervisor.d/sdrangelsrv.conf /etc/supervisor.d/sdrangelcli.conf

Reload supervisord configuration with sudo systemctl reload supervisord

Development

Prerequisites

Step 1. Configure your IDE

We'll be wring code using TypeScript and Angular, so it would be nice to have at least code highlighting and autocompletion. We recommend using:

Visual Studio Code (free) - After the installation, run the IDE and make sure the recommended extensions are installed as described in this guide. All extensions are listed under .vscode/extension.json and can be viewed in the UI using "Show workspace recommended extensions" filter.

Step 2. Install Angular Augury plugin

If you're using Chrome it might be a good idea to install the Augury Plugin that will help debugging Angular applications

Sdrangelcli

This project was generated with Angular CLI.

Development server

Run ng serve for a dev server. Navigate to http://localhost:4200/. The app will automatically reload if you change any of the source files.

Code scaffolding

Build

Run ng build to build the project. The build artifacts will be stored in the dist/ directory. Use the --prod flag for a production build.

Running unit tests

Run ng test or npm test to execute the unit tests via Karma. This is good for TDD as the tests run continuously whenever the code changes on disk.