BotHam

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  Testing out Audio Output

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  GNU Radio Companion

Inspiration

Andy Zhou and Benjamin Trinh are both Elective Board of CCNY's Amateur Radio Society. Due social-distancing guidelines caused by COVID-19, it is difficult to show club members the art of Ham Radio without the making everyone purchase a radio separately. Therefore, we created a solution to that problem. We created a Discord Bot that allows students to c

What it does

BotHam allows users to type in the frequency they want to listen to and be able to listen to that specific frequency. We also implemented a command that allows to bot to

How we built it

We are using a RTL - SDR connected to a Raspberry Pi 4 and we are trying to get an FM radio station to output using GNU Radio. We also used Discord as the platform for the bot.

Challenges we ran into

We had a lot of issues especially with GNU Radio Companion because we cannot get the audio to output at all. One of our members had to learn how to make a UI in Python. Most of our members did not know how to use Github so we also had to take some time to let them learn.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Most students in our team did not learn the Python coding language formally so we had to do our best to learn on the spot. We also had to implement the Discord API, Python SDR library, and learn how to program in GNU Radio Companion. This was very difficult to do as first time users.

What we learned

We learned how to use and implement the Discord API, how to code in Python, how to use Git and Github, how to program in GNU Radio Companion and more.

What's next for BotHam

We believe the next step for BotHam is to allow people to licenses to transmit via the bot. Licenses are needed for users to legally transmit so we would need to implement a way for the bot to confirm that the user holds a license, what kind of license they hold, and which frequency they can transmit to. This will allow people to transmit without the need of a radio. However, due to our current time limitation, we cannot implement this yet.

Built With

• discord
• git
• github
• gnuradio
• python
• raspberry-pi