Script to compile and install PulseView on Ubuntu

PulseView is an opensource GUI for sigrok. It displays recorded waveforms from logic analyzers and oscilloscopes and it can perform various signal measurements and digital protocol decoding. Being opensource and Qt based, it is also cross platform. You can find it in the Ubuntu repositories, but the version is rather old and you'll be missing some new features and protocol decoders.

You will find in this post a script based on building instructions from official sigrok/PulseView wiki that automatically downloads, builds and installs all required dependencies and PulseView itself. The script has been written and tested on Ubuntu 17.10 but it should work on other apt based distros.

PonyProg release 3.0 comes with modern UI

PonyProg is a software application that can read, write and program various memory chips and microcontrollers using the simplest possible interface: a serial port adapter. This adapter consist of only some resistors and some voltage limiting zener diodes. However, this approach has a big downside nowadays. It doesn't work with USB to serial converters. And computers with a real serial port are becoming very rare.

If you still have an older computer with a motherboard serial port, you may take into consideration building the serial adapter used by PonyProg, because it is easy to build and probably the cheapest programmer possible. The schematic of the interface can be found at the author's page (SI-Prog by Claudio Lanconelli).

Currently, PonyProg only support SI-Prog or other serial based programmers and some parallel port programmers. With serial port, it communicates by bit-banging various protocols to the signaling lines contained in the RS232 interface (RTS, CTR and DTR). It would be nice if a future version would support the modern USB based programmers (like the CH341A MiniProgrammer) which lack a good software.

PonyProg 3.0 main window after reading an I2C EEPROM

Using Magix USB-Videowandler 2 on Linux

Videowandler 2 is an USB analog video capture card. There is no official driver support for Linux and the device does not work when you plug it in. According to lsusb, the device is Afatech, which is totally wrong. The kernel only loads modules for USB audio - and this is the only thing that works (the audio input appears as a separate sound card).

Videowandler 2 is based on eMPIA 2861 USB chip. Video conversion is done by SAA7113 and audio conversion by EMP202. The IDs of the device are 1B80:E349. When opening the case, you may find printed on the board UB317 Ver:A or UB315 Ver:C. The latter my be identical to Kworld UB315 but I’m not sure.

Magix USB-Videowandler 2 board. Photo by Christian Enders.

How to compile and set up Dream DRM on Ubuntu

Dream is an open source software receiver and transmitter for DRM (Digital Radio Mondiale) standard. It is a cross-platform application, yet there are no up-to-date Linux packages for major distros. I tried to install existing packages and failed to launch Dream with a segmentation fault.

So I decided to build from source. Dream needs Qt development kit and some other libraries. For audio decoding and encoding, AAC libraries are needed. These are available in repositories, but most of the time they are compiled without DRM support. I will show you how to compile them with DRM support and make Dream detect them.

Update: Tested and working on Ubuntu 16.04 and 16.10.

The instructions below are based on the official instructions on Dream website. I updated them to work with newer Ubuntu releases and I also added a Desktop entry, so you can launch Dream from Dash. It should be noted that the source compiles on Qt5, yet Dream doesn't work (segmentation fault).

Compile and setup PonyProg on Ubuntu

PonyProg is a device programming software for the SI Prog serial interface programmer designed by Claudio Lanconelli. The latest version of the PonyProg software can be found on SourceForge, but there are no Ubuntu packages.

Here is how to compile it on Ubuntu. This post was updated for Ubuntu 16.10. First you'll have to install some development libraries:

sudo apt install build-essential libxt-dev libxmu-dev libxaw7-dev

Then download the archive from SourceForge and extract it to some folder you want (at the time of writing this, the latest version is 2.08d).