[idealdealy] had a problem. GNU Radio Companion was proving to be a powerful tool, but it just didn’t look… cool enough. The solution? A custom bit of software called PimpMyGRC, designed to jazz things up a bit in everyone’s favorite open-source SDR package.
In the creator’s own words, PimpMyGRC solves the problem nobody had with GNU Radio. It stemmed from [idealdealy]’s desire to have a plain black background in the software to ease eye strain during late night debug sessions. From there, it developed into a full theming package coded in Python, complete with all kinds of fun color schemes.
You can go with “arctic” if you’re somewhere cold, “bubblegum” if you’re feeling young and fun, or “neon hacker” if you’re still obsessed with early 90s movies with terrible plot holes around computers.
None of these themes will help you work faster, but they’ll probably make your friends jealous that your setup looks a little bit cooler than theirs. Plus, there are some really fun animated effects to catch your eye if your attention is fading. You might get flames dancing on the bottom of the screen, or binary digits falling through the display in a manner vaguely akin to terminals from The Matrix.
If you’re new to this world, you might like to check out this primer on getting started with GNU Radio. Meanwhile, if you’re cooking up your own SDR hacks of value, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline!
You hackers were so preoccupied with whether or not you could, you didn’t stop to think if you should.
Ditto.
Its irrelevant if they should because they could.
We always are. Wind us up and set us loose : -]
Thank fsck. i’ve been trying to do some work using the GRC for a while but i never managed to apply a theme to it in windows (<- not my fault) on and off for a while.
You have my thanks from the bottom of my retinas idealdelay.
“Cool.”
GNU apps are well known for their insistence on a UI that can be considered “retro” for several decades already. Amazingly by going full on GeoCities/MySpace you can really make them look worse.
A Slovak word “grc” may be translated to English as “barf”. Just saying…
GNU Radio maintainer here.
Hahaha, that’s such useless fun! Love it! (don’t love the few less-than-friendly commenters above, do they think this kind of talking down to a bunch of DSP people makes them better, more graced with time or more motivated to work on GUI things… but commenters gonna comment.)
Couple of things:
GNU Radio 3.10 ships with GRC’s Qt version (
gnuradio-companion --qt). Whether that’s default on your platform: up to installer-supplied default configuration. GRC-Qt comes with theming, and especially a dark theme, out of the box! (PimpMyGRC just seems to modify the older Gtk version of gnuradio-companion.) Thus:While I think this is tremendous fun and very silly in a positive way, I bet we could have built something more universally adoptable and useful upstream! Seriously, people, rather than writing a single commit with literally 26514 lines that does something hard-to-understand, please tell upstream what you’d like. THEY MIGHT ALREADY HAVE DONE IT! And if not, they might have guided you to implement the same (at least the universally useful parts, maybe not the flames and stuff) with a lot less code :)
Again, love it, and: if someone knows idealdealy: please send them the GNU Radio commmunity’s way – the first I (or anyone else among the core developer’s circles) heard of this was through someone posting the Hackaday article in our main matrix chat room #gnuradio:gnuradio.org (https://app.element.io/#/room/#gnuradio-community:gnuradio.org).