LibreSDR

This is an unofficial port of PlutoSDR onto LibreSDR a.k.a. ZynqSDR.
There is not a whole lot of information from the manufacturer, but the device can be purchased on Aliexpress, eBay and other platforms. The board schematics from one of the Aliexpress sellers is included, see zynqsdr_rev5.pdf This set of patches was not tested for full functionality in every possible mode, probably contains bugs or incorrect interpretations of schematics and intended for fellow hackers to get started with low level software and FPGA modifications.

Prerequisites: Prepare development environment for PlutoSDR v0.37, for details see https://github.com/analogdevicesinc/plutosdr-fw/tree/v0.37

This includes Vivado and Vitis 2021.2, please use only supported build host environment

How to build?

Extract this set of patches to a new directory, clone plutosdr software, please note the directory name in the apply.sh script, adjust as needed.

1. Clone this repository:

git clone git@github.com:day0wl/libresdr-fw.git

2. Change directory to the cloned source code and get original Pluto firmware code v.0.37

cd  libresdr-fw
git clone --recursive --branch v0.37 https://github.com/analogdevicesinc/plutosdr-fw.git plutosdr-fw_0.37_libre

3. Apply patches

./apply.sh

4. Change directory to patched Pluto firmaware sources and build it

cd plutosdr-fw_0.37_libre
export CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabihf-
export PATH=$PATH:/opt/Xilinx/Vitis/2021.2/gnu/aarch32/lin/gcc-arm-linux-gnueabi/bin
export VIVADO_SETTINGS=/opt/Xilinx/Vivado/2021.2/settings64.sh
export TARGET=libre
make
make sdimg

NOTE: you CAN NOT build with newer Vivado and Vitis, e.g. 2023.2 at the moment because it misses some HDL libraires

Tehe are some scripts to automate the job:

1. fetch_pluto_fw.sh fetches original PlutoSDR firmware sources to the plutosdr-fw_0.37_libre directory. Just call ./apply.sh after it.
2. build.sh does the rest of the job.

Make a cup of coffee, then probably one more. Collect results in build directory and in addition a set of files for the sd card in build_sdimg

Usually LibreSDR is shipped with empty qspi flash and boots from included SD card.

Use any small capacity sd card, format it as FAT32 and copy content of the build_sdimg directory on it. Insert the sdcard into LibreSDR and it should boot from it.

Once it is running, the software can be updated using mounted drive, just like PlutoSDR.

This will populate QSPI flash and LibreSDR will be able to run without SD Card

USB OTG will act as normal PlutoSDR. Serial console is available on the debug port as /dev/ttyUSB2 if you don’t have any other USB serial devices in the system. Set your terminal application to 115200N8 Gigabit Ethernet is enabled, IP address is set by default to 192.168.1.10

You can also use a full AD provided linux build, just replace BOOT.BIN and device tree file from this build and it should be able to mount the SD card as the root file system, This will aloow you to run any Linux applications or scripts directly on LibreSDR

From this point you are on your own, but pull requests and enhancements are welcome!