Spectrum Painter

A tool to converts images to IQ streams that look like this when viewed in a waterfall plot.

Spectrum Example

Setup

Dependencies

The following packages are required:

Installation

Installation is not required. You can run the program from the root directory of the repository using

python spectrum_painter/img2iqstream.py

If you want the program to be globally executable, you can install with pip. I recommend a developer install. From the root of the repository, this is done (for the current user) by

pip install --user -e .

Afterwards, the img2iqstream is available from everywhere.

Usage

Here is the program help, also available using img2iqstream --help.

Usage: img2iqstream [OPTIONS] [SRCS]...

Options:
  -s, --samplerate INTEGER        Samplerate of the radio
  -l, --linetime FLOAT            Time for each line to show
  -o, --output FILENAME           File to write to (default: stdout)
  --format [float|bladerf|hackrf]
                                  Output format of samples
  --help                          Show this message and exit.

The FFT adapts to the image size. However, I've not tried what happens for very wide or narrow images. Pictures with a horizontal resolution between about 512-2048 pixels seem to work fine, though. Only the first color channel of the image is used, so images should be black and white.

HackRF Example

Convert the smiley example for the HackRF.

img2iqstream -s 1000000 -l 0.004 -o smiley.iqhackrf --format hackrf examples/smiley.png

Then transmit using _hackrftransfer.

hackrf_transfer -t smiley.iqhackrf -f 2450000000 -b 1750000 -s 1000000 -x 20 -a 1

NOTE: I've got some reports that the above does not work with some original HackRF boards. Increasing the samplerate and bandwidth to 8 MHz seems to help in that case. If you have a rad1obadge, the lines above should work.

BladeRF Example

Convert the smiley example for the BladeRF

img2iqstream -s 1000000 -l 0.004 -o smiley.iqblade --format bladerf examples/smiley.png

The output can be used in bladeRF-cli with bin format.

Closing

This was a fun project at this years Chaos Communication Camp. It even works with a spectrum analyzer on the awesome rad1obadge ;).

rad1o example