I am already more then 4 years with Sigfox. The French global network operator founded in 2010 that builds wireless networks to connect low-power objects such as electricity meters and smartwatches, which need to be continuously on and emitting small amounts of data.1
One day my colleague Rahul Suryavamshi came to me that he tries to make work the Sigfox SDR Dongle with Sigfox Network Emulator and Sigfox Radio Signal Analyzer work on recently installed Ubuntu 20-04 LTS Focal Fosa and that the software refuses to start.
We did some basic analysis if the Sigfox SDR Dongle is found by the system with lsusb and it was:
...
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 2cc1:8001 NXP LPC
...
The only hint why the Sigfox SDR Dongle refused to start was this message:
/opt/snek/foxctl: error while loading shared libraries: libffi.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
RC=127
/usr/bin/zenity
Searching for the missing library we found that on Ubuntu 20-04 LTS Focal Fosa is a newer version of the required libffi.so library:
dummy@dummy:/opt/snek$ find /usr/lib -name "libffi.so*"
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libffi.so.7
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libffi.so.7.1.0
This pointed us for the solution. Creating a symbolic link symlink from the old required library to the new library present on the system as follows:
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libffi.so.7 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libffi.so.6
Start of the Sigfox SDR Dongle application suddenly worked:
dummy@dummy:/opt/snek$ ./start.sh
#
Programming DFU Device <0x2cc1:0x8001>: transferred 8 blocks of 2048B + last block 1368B
Firmware '/opt/snek/NED.bin.hdr' flashed to 1 device(s)
#
RC=0
nohup: appending output to 'nohup.out'
...
Sigfox SDR Dongle with Accessories