Talk:Beaglebone Spectrum Analyzer

2013.01.23
Decided to take a stab at making a quick-hack mockup of a spectrum analyzer using a Beaglebone and and rtlsdr DVB-T dongle. Must be ready by Saturday morning for a presentation I am giving at the 2013 Danish Winter VHF meeting.

To begin with I will be using the default Beaglebone demo image available from the download site, namely Angstrom-Cloud9-IDE-GNOME-eglibc-ipk-v2012.05-beaglebone-2012.11.22.img.xz. The application software will be built using:
 * librtlsdr
 * kiss_fft
 * Gtk+ for a simple GUI

2013.01.25
The spectrum analyzer is working, see photo.

Som info and benchmarks for this completely unoptimized image:
 * Automatically starts the application on boot.
 * Startup time is somewhere around 2 minutes (from power on till application is running).
 * CPU load is around 30% when doing 20 frames per second.

2013.01.26
Used the spectrum analyzer mock-up for demo during my SDR talk at the 2013 Danish winter VHF meeting. It was very well received and people were very interested. There has also been a lot of positive reaction on Twitter.