GNU Radio in the browser

Posted by kristianpaul 3 days ago

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Comments

Comment by thomashabets2 3 days ago

Oh that's cool!

I've set off time to blog about getting my broadband RF scanner (connecting to USRP B200 via WebUSB) to work in WASM.

https://rf-survey.habets.se/

It's basically https://blog.habets.se/2026/08/Broadband-RF-scanner-revisite..., but in the browser.

I also have an AX.25 decoder (https://thomashabets.github.io/ruwasm/) and plain old FM receiver (https://cement.retrofitta.se/tmp/rtlsdr-fm/) already. The latter two work with RTL-SDR, also via WebUSB, so no software installs or setup required.

I've been meaning to make a "GNU Radio in the Browser" (well, gnuradio-companion-like) for my RustRadio project to build flowgraphs without coding, but not gotten to it yet.

Comment by alightsoul 3 days ago

With wasm, I see a future where the browser and thus web technologies are a UI toolkit for a Linux desktop environment. It already is, people hardly use GTK and qt anymore except for desktop environments or embedded like on cars due to performance limitations. It would be cursed to see a browser running within a browser. But then replacing a desktop environment might be the limit of replacing GTK qt and other UI toolkits with web technologies, making it unnecessary and opposite to the reason people use Linux which is performance

Comment by thomashabets2 3 days ago

I agree. Browser APIs don't have as much coverage as native APIs, but I would say that by far most UIs should be in the browser nowadays.

Quake can run in the browser, so in my opinion so can the likes of Photoshop. Maybe the latest AAA game is a different beast, but that's a tiny edge case.

Websites instead of apps on mobile is something that basically always sucks, but I don't see the same on desktop.

Just build your UIs in WASM already. :-)

> It would be cursed to see a browser running within a browser

It's been done.

Comment by necovek 3 days ago

> Websites instead of apps on mobile is something that basically always sucks

I find it's the opposite: on my computer, I want native apps, but on the phone, it is very hard to manage a large collection of single use apps because I do not have a keyboard to quickly navigate between them.

Comment by pipe2devnull 3 days ago

If you are on an iPhone you can add a website to the Home Screen and it functions as a dedicated app essentially and the opened instance is treated separately from safari

Comment by not2b 2 days ago

It is the same on Android.

Comment by necovek 2 days ago

Uhm, I am saying that I do not want a 100 apps (website-based or native) on my phone because this is hard to manage without better human-computer interfaces like a big screen and physical keyboard.

So I am not sure how making a web page into an app actually helps me?

When they are a web page I frequent, typing a few letters in the browser URL bar gives me the URL to click on and get there.

Comment by pipe2devnull 1 day ago

You can type into the search bar to search for apps on your phone. I don’t really bother with things on my home screen

Comment by necovek 1 day ago

At least on my up-to-date Pixel phone, home screen search bar only searches the web (by default).

Comment by WorldPeas 3 days ago

gio with golang is a great place to start imo

Comment by password4321 2 days ago

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Igalia

> open source solutions … centering on browsers

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Igalia%20comments%3E5&sort=byD...

Comment by kruffalon 3 days ago

Off-topic:

http://retrofitta.se/

retrofitta

Definition

Add (a component or accessory) to something that did not have it when manufactured.

What did you think it meant?

[EoF]

Strålande! Well done :)

"Fitta" is sort of like "cunt" in Swedish & .se is the TLD of Sweden.

Comment by jjgreen 2 days ago

The Swedish Scunthorpe problem ...

Comment by iscarelli 2 days ago

[dead]

Comment by ghostly_s 3 days ago

No idea what I'm looking at, it's just combining some noise and a sawtooth wave to create pretty visuals I guess? if this is meant to serve as an introduction to the project it's not really succeeding. The "Description" isn't even readable despite most of the page being used for empty space. I guess it's expected to have no audio output? I presume the real purpose of this is to process signals from an actual radio?

The "Help"->"Help" menu item is notably unhelpful:

> For questions, comments, or suggestions, you can email support@gnuradioworld.com, join the Discord server, or post a GitHub issue.

"Help"->"About" at least starts to clarify some things:

> GNU Radio, entirely in your browser — explore the open-source SDR ecosystem with zero install!

> GNU Radio World is a browser-based GNU Radio Companion flowgraph editor and WebAssembly runtime. You can place, connect, and configure blocks, then run the resulting flowgraph directly in your browser.

> It is designed to download only the WebAssembly modules corresponding to the blocks you use. This on-demand architecture keeps the initial download small and can support a limitless collection of out-of-tree modules (OOTs) in the future.

> GNU Radio World also includes a collection of real RF recordings that are downloaded only when you use them. You can inspect the recordings in the built-in recording view, adapted from IQEngine, and use them in the included flowgraph examples, allowing OOTs to be shown off with real recordings of the corresponding signals

Comment by pysdr 2 days ago

Hey it's Marc, creator of GNU Radio World, I'm glad you brought this up, I made it thinking it would be used by folks already familiar with GNU Radio, but this site can double as a way to introduce new people to GNU Radio, so it might as well have a more friendly introduction that walks you through the basics. I'll start working on it!

Comment by jcims 3 days ago

I tinkered with gnuradio back when rtl-sdr just took off (2012ish?).

I had no background in dsp or signal processing and found it so opaque as to be unusuable, even though I saw more skilled folks do amazing things with it.

*scratches head*

Might give it another go.

Comment by vmilner 3 days ago

New textbook may help

https://www.gnuradio.org/news/2025-01-29-gnuradio-textbook/

Comment by perrygeo 3 days ago

I've tinkered with SDR some and did a bit professionally. I always found GNU Radio to fall into the uncanny valley - too GUI to scratch my programming itch but too low-level to be useful for exploration. Between libraries like `pyrtlsdr` and desktop apps like `sdrangel`, I can't seem to find a niche for GNU Radio.

Comment by keeda 3 days ago

I worked with GNU Radio quite a bit at one point a decade+ ago, even writing a custom C++ block, but I almost exclusively used it via Python rather than the GUI toolkit. I found it much quicker to mess around with flow graphs in code than their various UI frameworks, spawning windows as needed when plotting waveforms / spectra etc. The GUI as you said was too cumbersome.

I understand that they were trying to make a pretty complicated topic more approachable, but I always felt the push to GUI was misguided. Maybe they would have had more luck embracing the “S” in “SDR” and making programming languages the primary development paradigm.

Comment by stackghost 3 days ago

Run through pysdr[0], which I found has the right complexity gradient and the right levels of abstraction for people with technical chops but who aren’t familiar with SDR

[0] https://www.pysdr.org/

Comment by Enginerrrd 3 days ago

I have to say having just done a very tricky project with a long DSP pipeline in gnuradio, that LLMs are a godsend for getting up to speed on gnuradio blocks. I too found it historically impenetrable, but was able to get a pipeline completed. That said, prepare yourself for a lot of debugging and work to diagnose problems if you’re doing anything of sufficient complexity.

Comment by jcims 2 days ago

That's exactly what had me scratching my head!!! Feels like it' (sorry) unlocks the boundary of the specifics and lets me work with ideas.

Comment by sigbottle 3 days ago

At the end of the day, DSP is a lot of math and a lot of hardware. A lot of GNU Radio's code is a monster unification of so many different choices into certain interfaces (or duplication of the same choices) for, presumably performance reasons? Or just keeping every single DSP technique ever in the God Library for the super power greybeard to use.

If you have a certain DSP goal in mind (say, RF comms), and you want to do stuff but not absolutely balls-to-the-walls processing (at that point, presumably you'd move to hardware), you can design your stack in fairly modular and composable ways. The field is pretty mature and the techniques just work.

In a software context, you can decompose the abstractions fairly cleanly. You won't get 5G high performance networking but you can get good enough results.

Comment by pysdr 2 days ago

I'm glad people like it!!! I'll keep working on improving the site and adding support for more SDRs and OOTs. My initial motivation for creating GNU Radio World was to have a way to embed interactive examples into PySDR.org, which I have started to do, eg see https://pysdr.org/content/sync#frame-synchronization. I think GNU Radio World has a lot of potential directions it could go, and if anyone is interested in helping out with it feel free to join the Discord server or email me.

-Marc

Comment by baileynoack 3 days ago

This is super cool! It reminds me of MaxMSP and really takes me back to some signal processing classes. The GUI is pretty nice to interact with. I'll definitely be playing around with this some more, awesome project!

Comment by pysdr 2 days ago

Thanks!!!

Comment by mikewarot 2 days ago

That's certainly handy... here's a simple audio frequency shifter I threw together[1].

First it takes the audio from your microphone. It then feeds it through a Hilbert transform to convert incoming audio into an IQ (complex) format. The advantage of an IQ signal format is that when you multiply it by another signal, the frequencies add or subtract, without getting extra image frequencies. This is why it's worth doing twice the computation in DSP work.

Then your audio is multiplied by a cosine wave with a frequency determined by a GUI slider, from -2000 to 2000 Hz.

This has the net effect of raising or lowering the pitch of your voice, like tuning in a single sideband transmission on ham radio.

To get the results out to the speakers, it samples only the real component to send to the audio output.

The net effect is it can raise or lower the frequency of your voice.

[1] https://gnuradioworld.com/#fg=H4sIAAAAAAAACsVXS2_bOBC--1fMTR...

Comment by pysdr 2 days ago

Hey this is Marc, I just posted your example flowgraph to the site, after adding some Time Sinks to visualize the sound. Should be under the Audio category of example flowgraphs. Really glad you played around with it!!

Comment by tamimio 3 days ago

That’s amazing, thanks for the share! I did a small test, it works, screen is a bit harder to navigate on small screens but not an issue.

Comment by pysdr 2 days ago

Good to know, I'll see what I can do! There are zoom buttons for the editor but I imagine it's more about the left pane.

Comment by codingjoe 2 days ago

They put radio on the Internet... ¡Tres Comas!

Comment by miki_tyler 3 days ago

This is so cool! Congrats!

Comment by gvieri 3 days ago

Cool. On github forked and starred. Thank you.

Comment by ghostly_s 3 days ago

Please don't use "fork" as a bookmark, it's quite annoying.

Comment by gvieri 6 hours ago

I used this options because I'm planning to use and modify (time permetting) . Maybe I'll contribute some code.

Comment by jsLavaGoat 2 days ago

If that’s something you have time to be annoyed by you live a blessed life.

Comment by 3 days ago