Hi,
I am just wondering if anyone has tried this on other SBCs or other mini pc? I know other images were in the works but just curious if it’s feasible to compile on something using the Rockchip 3588s (Orange Pi 5 or Khadas Edge Pro, etc) or if I should get something like a little Celeron N5005 or i3 mini pc to tide me over for a little while. I do have a Jetson nano collecting dust and may try to compile everything on that but that is a serious project potentially and I do plan on getting a Jetson Orin early next year if they are actually available. Just curious what others have tried so far? What kind of update rates are you getting with your setups?
I was running the pr code on my nuc, fed from a rpi4 that had the kraken on it and all worked well
I’m in my infant SDR steps, but I chose ZimaBoard with Ubuntu, and so far, I’m a happy camper. It just works.
I use the 8GB/32GB version, feeding it both from the wall and the portable battery, never seen more than 7Wt over the 12V line, no crashes or lags.
Works OK on the Latte Panda 3 Delta.
For DOA almost any cheap device with power similar to a Pi4 works well.
We’ve been using Wyse 5070 thin clients as DOA test benches (sold cheaply on eBay as ex office equipment). The OPI4 works well too, but i’ve been having major issues with it not booting correctly all the time (completely unrelated to the Kraken code, something to do with the EMMC).
I have an OPI5 preordered for testing as well. That looks like a really great device hardware and price wise, at least until the Raspberry Pi 5 eventually comes out.
The Jetson Nano has also been tested and it works, but the CPU is a bit underpowered compared to a Pi4. The GPU is not used in DOA so there’s no benefit to dedicating such an expensive device to it.
If you’re doing stuff in GNU Radio, it’s better to use a more powerful device.
Could you use the GPU with some different numba decorators?
Yes or by using cupy, but I don’t think it’s as simple as just adding a decorator. Some work to write things in a GPU friendly way would still be required, and the time to invoke the GPU is probably not worth it for just DOA.
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Hi Carl, Have you had any luck with your Orange Pi 5 yet? If so, which distro?
thanks!
Haven’t gotten around testing yet sorry. I have it running a standard RTL-SDR just fine at the moment though. Will try to get Kraken tests done on it next week.
Ok confirming that the Orange Pi 5 is working well after installing via script, and it’s really nice and fast. The GUI is much snappier compared to a Pi4.
Using the official Ubuntu Jammy Desktop distro provided by Orange Pi from Orange Pi - Orangepi
Four cores sit at around 25-30% CPU utilization and the other four are usually under 5%.
One important note about the OPI5 is that the default package is missing WiFi, so it won’t work without a wired network connection. That makes it impossible to use mobile in the car.
I haven’t seen any official WiFi add on released yet, but I would recommend going with a M2 or PCIE wifi add on card, instead of a USB dongle. Remember that the Kraken requires a heck load of USB 2.0 bandwidth, and other high data rate devices on the same bus could cause sample drops, which results in a loss of sample alignment, and hence a loss of coherence.
We saw this happen on the Pi 3, which had the USB and WiFi interface shared on the same bus. When loading a webpage on the Pi3, downloading updates, or even just using the web GUI heavily, the Kerberos would lose coherence.
There is a band-aid solution though if you really want to use a WiFi USB dongle. You can install a tool like wondershaper to heavily restrict the max network bandwidth. You only need enough bandwidth to load up the GUI and pass out the text data for the Android app.
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I’ve tested two alternative computers. First was an old Panasonic Toughbook I had, the specs were similar to a Raspberry Pi 4, but ultimately could not get the majority of the drivers to operate. Second unit is the HigolePC from Amazon. After a lot of fighting with software drivers, I did get the PC running the software, but thermal management was terrible. It got so hot it unsoldered the CPU. In the trash it went. I just recently ordered two different Odroid units. First is the more powerful H3+ which requires the additional purchase of RAM and an NVME. The second is the N2+ which is more or less the SBC you are familiar with but has a massive built in heatsync. This Texas heat is a killer for a lot of computers.
If I had one suggestion it would be for the Kraken2.0 to just come with integrated PC hardware. It would be fantastic to have an out-of-the-box working solution.
I have two Pi4 w/4 GB. I just can not get them to run stable when overclocked. They always seem to lock up after a few minutes runtime (with fan cooling).
Why do they need to run overclocked?
This is a part of the instructions under the additional hardware section.
Any 2GB or larger Pi 4 model will work, however we recommend trying to obtain the newer model Pi 4’s that can turbo to 1.8 GHz. We also recommend obtaining an aftermarket fan cooling solution for the Pi 4 as if the CPU throttles significantly due to CPU overheating the code may run slowly and lag. The newer model Pi 4’s almost never throttle even without cooling, but older ones tend to throttle much easier. Optionally we also suggest overclocking them to 2 GHz or higher for best performance as long as you have sufficient cooling in place.
In the past when Kraken was just being thought about as a successor to the KerberosSDR, we queried Kerberos users, but the vast majority did not want built in computing. However, back then cheap Pi 3B+ devices were a commodity. With the Raspberry Pi shortages, built in hardware may help in these times of shortages. But at the same time it could have also killed the project if we required a part that was out of stock for years.
For overclocking Pi4B+'s, if you got a unit that can’t overclock even to 2GHz (even with the voltage increases) then it’s just bad luck sadly. Every Pi4B+ I’ve gotten can at least reach 2 GHz. Overclocking isn’t a necessity though, it just helps make the GUI a little more snappy. There’s no change to DOA performance as DOA runs at a fixed rate anyway.
Orange Pi 5B has on-board WiFi 
Nice. That’s probably going to be the best device. But when does it release?
I can confirm that it works quite stable on OPI4LTS with their Orangepi4-lts_3.0.6_debian_bullseye_server_linux5.10.43 image. I also tried the image from armbian, but it is not stable and the wifi module segfaults. The only thing is that you need to have a very good USB cable in the top port.
The disadvantage of the Orangepi4 image is that the kernel does not have many modules, like different VPNs, tun/tap etc. . I was forced to rebuild a new one.
I have the KrakenSDR running in GNU Radio on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed in a VirtualBox VM on an old MacPro 5.1 with an add-in USB 3 card.