PySDR Textbook Source Material

This repo contains the source content used to generate the textbook PySDR: A Guide to SDR and DSP using Python hosted at https://pysdr.org.

Feel free to submit an issue, or even a Pull Request (PR) with fixes or improvements. Those who submit valuable feedback/fixes be permanently added to the acknowledgments section. Not good at Git but have changes to suggest? Feel free to email Marc at pysdr@vt.edu.

Building

Note that the website is now automatically built and deployed with each push/merge into master branch, using the GitHub action build-and-deploy.yml and the GitHub pages system for hosting the actual textbook.

For testing changes to the textbook locally, you can build using the following steps:

Ubuntu/Debian

Look at .github/workflows/build-and-deploy.yml and run the apt/pip installs, then:

make html
make html-fr
make html-nl
make html-ukraine
make html-zh

In _build there should be an index.html that represents the main page of the English site

Note: on one machine I had to add ~/.local/bin to PATH

Windows

Install pre-requisite software with:

1. Install Tex Live from the install-tl-windows.exe link towards the beginning of https://www.tug.org/texlive/acquire-netinstall.html (after opening it, choose the Install option). When a box pops up, click Advanced. It will mention Installation root C:/texlive/2023 which we need later. Uncheck Install TeXworks front end because we wont need it. Under Scheme click "change" and choose basic scheme. Hit Install. It will take a while because it installs a lot of common latex packages, you can do the remaining steps while this installs. You know it worked if you now have a C:\texlive\2023\bin\windows\latex.exe.
2. From the Microsoft Store install Python 3.10 (3.8-3.12 is fine too if you already have it installed).
3. In a PowerShell terminal (click start menu then type powershell, or open a terminal in VSCode) run pip install sphinx sphinxcontrib-tikz patreon
4. cd to the directory you cloned PySDR
5. Separately, open "Tex live command-line" app from start menu, then run tlmgr install dvisvgm pgf (pgf is tikz).

Build the English version only using:

python -m sphinx.cmd.build -b html -D imgmath_latex="C:\texlive\2023\bin\windows\latex.exe" -D imgmath_dvisvgm="C:\texlive\2023\bin\windows\dvisvgm.exe" . _build

The first time running this it might take a while because it has to download LaTeX packages.

Creating a PDF Export

Not fully working yet due to animated gifs, they all need to be removed for this to not error out:

sudo apt-get install -y latexmk
sphinx-build -b latex . _build/latex
make latexpdf

Misc

Ideas for future chapters:

• Equalization, would be the last step needed to finish the end-to-end communications link
• OFDM, simulating OFDM and CP, show via Python how it turns freq selective fading into flat fading
• How to create real-time SDR apps with GUIs in Python using pyqt and pyqtgraph, or even just matplotlib with updating
• Python code that lets the Pluto (or RTL-SDR) act as an FM receiver, like with sound output
• End-to-end example that shows how to detect start of packet and other concepts not covered in RDS chapter
• Intro to radar

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Unported License.