conferences | speakers | series

Stupid Pluto Tricks

home

Stupid Pluto Tricks
FOSDEM 2018

The ADALM-PLUTO SDR can be used as both a streaming (to GNU Radio device) as well as a standalone SDR, since it includes a single core ARM A9, and runs Linux inside. Although it requires closed source tools (Xilinx), they are zero cost, and with a little time, custom firmware images can be created, allowing the device to be a standalone radio platform.

This talk will show a few different things that can be done, including a ADS-B receiver, an instrument to measure Noise Pollution, a stealth RF capture device (to investigate RF), and a cell phone jammer detector.

The ADALM-PLUTO SDR can be used as a RF streaming device over USB 2 to Linux's Industrial I/O (IIO) clients like GNU Radio, or custom applications in C, C++, or python. These applications can also be run directly on the device, and the userspace library (libiio) abstracts the transport (USB, network, serial, or local) away from the application. With a single line code change, and a cross compiler, applications can move from being run on a host, or locally on the device. It's even easier if you are using devices like Raspberry Pi, since you don't need a cross compiler.

This talk will go through a few quick demos, showing (1) how to build custom firmware images; (2) how to track airplanes overhead; (3) How and why RF noise pollution is bad, and how it can be tracked/monitored; and (4) investigate portable cell phone jammers, that are being sold on the internet (for research purposes only). Five minutes will be spent on each topic, and code on github will be pointed to.

Speakers: Robin Getz