We created this project to make astronomy accessible to anyone that is interested and bring opportunities to learn about radio astronomy to a broad audience. You can find our full mission statement on our About page.
Our online tutorials will guide you step-by-step in creating your own radio telescope at home or in the classroom.
The tutorials are a work in progress, but so far will walk you through:
- Acquiring materials and equipment
- Setting up a Raspberry Pi to run GNU Radio
- Taking data with GNU Radio and a Software Define Radio (SDR)
- Building a feed horn to detect the 21cm signal from the Milky Way galaxy
Here we provide the software installation instructions to get you started.
Note the 2023 release of Raspberry Pi OS (Bookworm) does not allow global pip installs. You will need to set up a virtual environment:
python -m venv --system-site-packages ~/chartenv
source chartenv/bin/activateClick for analysis only instructions
If you are only using the analysis code, you can simply clone the repo and use pip to install. This is the install using ssh.
git clone git@github.com:astrochart/CHART.git
cd CHART
pip install .If you want to use https, use this:
git clone https://github.com/astrochart/CHART.git
cd CHART
pip install .Click for full installation instructions
CHART software uses GNU Radio, a free open source package for collecting and processing radio data. To learn more about GNU Radio visit this site https://www.gnuradio.org/about/.
We will assume you are running Raspberry Pi OS on a Raspberry Pi (instructions here). First make sure you have activated your virtual environment (see above).
In a terminal, enter the following:
sudo apt install gnuradio-dev gr-osmosdr librtlsdr-dev build-essential git cmake xtermIf you are using the RTL-SDR Blog v4 dongle, we need to update the driver. Full details are here, and we have included the relevant commands below for convenience.
sudo apt install libusb-1.0-0-dev
sudo apt install debhelper
git clone https://github.com/rtlsdrblog/rtl-sdr-blog
cd rtl-sdr-blog
sudo dpkg-buildpackage -b --no-sign
cd ..
sudo dpkg -i librtlsdr0_*.deb
sudo dpkg -i librtlsdr-dev_*.deb
sudo dpkg -i rtl-sdr_*.deb
echo 'blacklist dvb_usb_rtl28xxu' | sudo tee --append /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-dvb_usb_rtl28xxu.confReboot the system.
To use the GPS submodule (optional), run these lines:
sudo apt install gpsd gpsd-clients
pip install gpsClone this repository and install.
git clone https://github.com/astrochart/CHART.git
cd CHART
pip install .
