pyrtlsdr is a simple Python interface to devices supported by the RTL-SDR project, which turns certain USB DVB-T dongles employing the Realtek RTL2832U chipset into low-cost, general purpose software-defined radio receivers. It wraps all the functions in the librtlsdr library (including asynchronous read support), and also provides a more Pythonic API.
- Windows/Linux/OSX
- Python 2.7.x
- librtlsdr (builds dated after 24/4/12)
- Optional: NumPy (wraps samples in a more convenient form)
matplotlib is also useful for plotting data. The librtlsdr binaries (rtlsdr.dll in Windows and librtlsdr.so in Linux) should be in the pyrtlsdr directory, or a system path.
All functions in librtlsdr are accessible via librtlsdr.py and a Pythonic interface is available in rtlsdr.py (recommended). Some documentation can be found in docstrings in the latter file.
Simple way to read and print some samples:
from rtlsdr import RtlSdr
sdr = RtlSdr()
# configure device
sdr.sample_rate = 2e6
sdr.center_freq = 70e6
print sdr.read_samples(32)Plotting the PSD with matplotlib:
from pylab import *
from rtlsdr import *
sdr = RtlSdr()
# configure device
sdr.sample_rate = 3.2e6
sdr.center_freq = 95e6
sdr.gain = 5
samples = sdr.read_samples(500e3)
# use matplotlib to estimate and plot the PSD
psd(samples, NFFT=1024, Fs=sdr.sample_rate/1e6, Fc=sdr.center_freq/1e6)
xlabel('Frequency (MHz)')
ylabel('Relative power (dB)')
show()See the file 'test.py' for more examples.
Credit to dbasden for his earlier wrapper python-librtlsdr.
-- Roger