Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Where to start in learning to develop and contribute to GNU Radio?

[Marcus Müller]

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Hi Ken,
welcome to the community!

I'll go ahead and answer in-line, since this seems to make sense here:
On 11.04.2014 23:16, Ken Adams wrote:
> I recently graduated with my degree in Computer Engineering, and
> the GNU Radio project is by far the most complex thing I've desired
> to work on. I'm looking for tips on how to get started learning GNU
> Radio from the ground up, build custom modules, and help develop
> the source.
just go through the Information on the main wiki side
http://gnuradio.org . A lot of people make the mistake to skip the
first pages (what GNU Radio is etc), and end up having misconceptions
after weeks of development.

> For example, an known issue that I would like to eventually be able
> to work on is solving Message Passing blocks not terminating from
> head block (and similar) termination.
That's actually a rather complicated scheduler problem. A solution is
highly desirable, but to make it short: The GNU Radio asynchronous
message passing interface does not support specifying an "end of
usage" state for the message port. If GR stopped execution when the
synchronous sample stream flowgraph was finished, not all messages
might have been delivered...
I see this as an architectural challenge, actual.

> 
> So my question is, what type of road map should I construct for
> learning the in's and out's of gnu radio, from custom module
> writing, all the way down to the scheduler. I have the absolute
> basics down (writing blocks in python) and will move to the C API
> next. But I'm not sure on where to start understanding the
> foundation of how it all works together.

You'll learn by doing, actually.
"Official" written documentation is sparse (a little bit) and can be
found in some presentations and papers.
But the main source of information is of course the (luckily in most
parts nicely readable) source code.

> Through my journey, I'm looking to improve the Documentation of GNU
> Radio so it is easy for new people to join the project.
I like your attitude ;)


Greetings,
and: happy hacking!

Marcus
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