AIS receiver for the Raspberry Pi

This is very much a work in progress…

Installing the RTL_SDR software

http://www.satsignal.eu/raspberry-pi/AIS-receiver.html

2013-Nov-19

This information is a direct copy of my write-up for installing the same software for the ADS-B dump 1090 program.

sudo apt-get install git-core
sudo apt-get install cmake
sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0-0–dev
git clone git://git.osmocom.org/rtl-sdr.git
cd rtl-sdr
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ../ -DINSTALL_UDEV_RULES=ON
make
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig
cd ~
sudo cp ./rtl-sdr/rtl-sdr.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/
sudo reboot
rtl_test
rtl_test -t (for E4000-based tuner)

SE NON FUNZIONA E restituisce il seguente errore:

usb_claim_interface error -6
Failed to open rtlsdr device #0

Some research told me that apparently this is caused by a conflict with the DVB-T kernel modules provided by the Linux kernel. There were two sugested remedies:

1) Blacklist the kernel modules using modprobe.d. You need to create a file /etc/modprobe.d/librtlsdr-blacklist.conf and put the following in it: “blacklist dvb_usb_rtl28xxu” (Without the quotes). I tried this, and it didn’t work – same error.

2) Option 2 – enable detaching the kernel module at compile time, when you build the rtl-sdr driver. This feature is disabled by default in the CMakeLists.txt file (for those interested, the changelog is here: http://ftp-master.metadata.debian.or….README.Debian

To enable it when building with cmake, you need the option: cmake ../ -DDETACH_KERNEL_DRIVER=ON

So the relevant section in your HowTo doc would become:

cd rtl-sdr
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ../ -DDETACH_KERNEL_DRIVER=ON -DINSTALL_UDEV_RULES=ON
make
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig

Installing the AIS Decoder software

From: http://forum.aishub.net/ais-decoder/ais-decoder-beta-release/new/

The basic instructions are:

wget http://www.aishub.net/downloads/aisdecoder.tar.gz
tar zxvf aisdecoder.tar.gz
cd aisdecoder
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ../ -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release

At this point, the cmake command was not found, so I tried:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cmake

and then repeated the command:

cmake ../ -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release

This resulted in the error messages:

— Build configuration: Release
CMake Error at CMakeLists.txt:54 (MESSAGE):
The development files for ALSA or PulseAudio are required – libasound-dev,
libpulse-dev

— Configuring incomplete, errors occurred!

So let’s try installing those packages, but first remove the file which tells cmake which packages were found or not. If you don’t do this, no amount of installing packages will help, and you can waste an entire morning chasing the problem, Been there, done that!