CHART
The Completly Hackable Amateur Radio Telescope
https://astrochart.github.io
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
Software Installation
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/activate
Analysis Only
Click 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.
```bash
git clone git@github.com:astrochart/CHART.git
cd CHART
pip install .
```
If you want to use https, use this:
```bash
git clone https://github.com/astrochart/CHART.git
cd CHART
pip install .
```
Full 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](https://astrochart.github.io/website/software.html)).
First make sure you have activated your virtual environment (see above).
In a terminal, enter the following:
```bash
sudo apt install gnuradio-dev gr-osmosdr librtlsdr-dev build-essential git cmake xterm
```
If you are using the RTL-SDR Blog v4 dongle, we need to update the driver. Full details are [here](https://www.rtl-sdr.com/v4/),
and we have included the relevant commands below for convenience.
```bash
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.conf
```
Reboot the system.
To use the GPS submodule (optional), run these lines:
```bash
sudo apt install gpsd gpsd-clients
pip install gps
```
Clone this repository and install.
```bash
git clone https://github.com/astrochart/CHART.git
cd CHART
pip install .
```