Hi!
Just want to share a few thoughts I had reading through the page about GSoC.
"GNU Radio NCurses Support":Albeit this sounds awesome, I also come to think about doing this over http. Have a look at how Node-Red (https://nodered.org/) works and looks. Instead of trying to implement something in the console, I think there is great success to be found doing this in a browser instead.
Using SSH to connect to your remote and setup a TCP-tunnel over it, and then access your GRC in your browser. Or for the savy, set it up using https over nginx or proxy of choice. Maybe a lot of code from the Node-Red project can be re-used. Using WebSockets and other new tech's in browser-dev could really do a difference here.
"Implement optimized, standardized channel codes":
There was a discussion a while ago regarding how polynomials are used in the different blocks of GRC and GR. At least for GRC, my opinion is that it should be friendly towards new users who might not be programmers. Today, polynomials are entered as an integer, and the size of the polynomial must be entered in another field, even though it could be determined from the polynomial. Example: Mask: 0x8003 K:14 => [15,1,0]
My suggestion is that, at least in GRC, maybe as parallel blocks to the existing, that polynomials are entered in the [15,1,0] fashion, as a Python-list of exponents, and that mask and K are derived from that input, instead of the other way around. This goes for the blocks Scrambler, Descrambler, LFSR-generators, Reed-Solomon FEC, and probably more.
Hope my toughts inspire some discussion and improves gnuradio, my favorite open-source project, thank you for reading.