Getting the DealExtreme EZCap 668 Working on Mac OS X 10.7

rtl_macos_guide

These directions are cobbled together from a variety of sources I found on the web. This worked for me last night and I verified functionality by tuning in a local FM station with gnuradio.

The prerequisites:
1) A working install of MacPorts: http://www.macports.org/install.php
2) XQuartz, I installed this because the X11.app was not working correctly for me: http://xquartz.macosforge.org/landing/

The install:
---[GNURadio]---
1) sudo port install gnuradio - Go get a coffee, work a day, have a beer, check on it
This will currently give you an install of gnuradio 3.3.0 - which does work even though the docs indicate it won't.

---[RTL-SDR driver]---
2) Download libusb-1.0 from here to where ever you compile stuff: http://sourceforge.net/projects/libusb/files/libusb-1.0/libusb-1.0.9/
3) tar -jxvf libusb-1.0.9.tar.bz2
4) cd libusb-1.0.9
5) ./configure
6) make
7) sudo make install
8) cd ..
9) git clone git://git.osmocom.org/rtl-sdr.git
10) cd rtl-sdr
11) mkdir build
12) cd build
13) cmake ../
14) make
15) sudo make install

---[gr-baz]---
16) cd ..
17) git clone https://github.com/balint256/gr-baz.git
18) cd gr-baz
19) sh bootstrap    --- for some reason this file was not +x
20) export PKG_CONFIG=/opt/local/bin/pkg-config
21) ./configure
22) make
Detour: During the build here I hit a few bumps. There were constants named SO_SNDBUFFORCE and SO_RCVBUFFORCE in 2 cc files which could not be resolved so I changed them to SO_SNDBUF and SO_RCVBUF accordingly since I noticed those constants were available. I'm not sure what the issue is here. The changes were in lib/baz_udp_sink.cc and lib/baz_udp_source.cc
23) cd grc
24) mkdir ~/.grc_gnuradio
25) cp * ~/.grc_gnuradio

Now you have a working GNURadio setup. Want to test it?

I found some working gnuradio-companion configurations here:
https://github.com/csete/gnuradio-grc-examples.git

1) git clone https://github.com/csete/gnuradio-grc-examples.git
2) gnuradio-companion
3) Open receiver/wfm_rx.grc
4) Delete the USRP source block
5) Add an RTL2832 source block
6) In the properties of the source block set the frequency to usrp_freq. This will let you use the existing USRP UI to control the RTL282
7) Save
8) Start it up

Since you mention MacPorts as a prerequisite, you could probably just get libusb that way. The current version at time of writing there is 1.0.9.